Author-year citation with natbib and Springer's spbasic bibliography style

Question

I found many solutions to similar problems here, but I still cannot solve this one: I'm using Springer's template like this:

 \documentclass[twocolumn, natbib]{svjour3}     
 \usepackage{graphicx}
 \usepackage{natbib}
 ...
 \bibliographystyle{spbasic}      % basic style, author-year citations
 \bibliography{my_bibliography}

and I get an error: Bibliography not compatible with author-year citations.

I really cannot figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Answer 1

(This answer is transferred from a comment I left some time ago.)

The bibliography style you've selected, spbasic, is geared towards authoryear-style citation styles when paired with the natbib citation management package. To generate numeric-style citations, load the natbib package with the option numbers.