\cite only returning link to bibliography and not author details

Question

I'm new to LaTeX, and I'm having some issued with \cite.

When I use \cite, the only thing that appears in the text is a number in squared-brackets with a link to the bibliography page. E.g: \cite{Reference1} --> [1]

Why isn't it printing out the author's name(s)?

\usepackage[square, numbers, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}

---

\label{Bibliography}
\lhead{\emph{Bibliography}}
\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\bibliography{Bibliography} 

Do I need to compile something else? Or am I missing some file?

Answer 1

The natbib package supports two main citation schemes: numeric and author-year. The default scheme is numeric (usually with the number in brackets like [3]) and can be specified with the (redundant) numbers option.

The author-year scheme, in which citations are like (Gauss, 1801), can be specified with the option authoryear. In this case other options such as square, comma and sort&compress should be omitted, as in parenthetical citations parentheses (...) rather than brackets [...] are more common.

Look at the package manual for the different citation commands for the author-year scheme: \citep, \citet, \citeauthor and \citeyear.

If you are just starting with LaTeX, I recommend to try biblatex rather than natbib. The former package is more recent and much more powerful. However one should be aware of the fact that some journals still don't support the more recent package.