Adding both number and authors at citation's place?

Question

When reading papers I find useful to have citations numbered instead of a key or the author name, since then it's easier to look them up in the bibliography at the end of the document.

On the other hand knowing the author's name along with the number at the citations' place is helpful too, since it may hint that a given author is involved in a series of papers dealing with a specific aspect of the problem you're describing, making her name easier to remember to the reader.

How do I achieve both in LaTeX? In practice I'm trying to get

as seen in [1 - J. Doe et al] ....

at citation's place, and

[1] John Doe et al, ....

in the bibliography

and would you consider it a good compromise?

Answer 1

I haven't seen that citation style before, and personally I would choose an author-year style. That said, you can achieve what you want with the natbib package and defining a command to use the optional argument of \cite to include that authors as a note; a simple example:

\begin{filecontents*}{mybibl.bib}
@book{goossens93,
    author = "Michel Goossens",
    title = "The {LaTeX} Companion",
    year = "1993",
    publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
    address = "Reading, Massachusetts"
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}

\setcitestyle{notesep={~- }}

\newcommand\citena[1]{\cite[\citeauthor{#1}]{#1}}

\begin{document}

\cite{goossens93}

\citeauthor{goossens93}

\citena{goossens93}

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{mybibl}

\end{document}