How to make the author and year show when citing a source

Question

I am trying to cite a source in my file. I want it to come out as "(see Author et al. (Year) for a discussion)". I already have the natbib package in use, and I set my \bibliographystyle to {plainnat}. However, what comes out when I generate the pdf file is:

(see (author?) [1] for a discussion)

with "(author?)" in bold text. How can I show the author/s and the year instead of the reference number?

Answer 1

After loading natbib, but still in the preamble, provide the instruction

\setcitestyle{authoryear,round}

Alternatively, you could load the natbib package with the options authoryear and round:

\usepackage[authoryear,round]{natbib}