BibTex doesn't recognize the author field on my bibliography entry

Question

I have a pst2.bib database with only one entry:

@book{jackson91,
    author    = "Jackson, John David",
    title     = "Classical Electrodynamics",
    publisher = "John Wiley \& Sons, Inc.",
    address  = "New Jersey, USA",
    edition  = "3",
    year      = "1991"
}

At the end of my .tex file I have the following code:

According to \citet{jackson91}, blah blah...

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{pst2}

and at the beginning I'm importing the natbib package.

The output of this is

According to (author?) [1], blah blah...

If I change \citet{jackson91} to \cite{jackson91} it just goes

According to [1], blah blah...

but I want to use the \citetcommand from natbib.

It seems that the referencing engine manages to identify my BiBTeX entry from the database, but doesn't manage to identify the various fields in the entry. Why not? How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Use plainnat instead of plain.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{natbib}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{jackson91,
    author    = "Jackson, John David",
    title     = "Classical Electrodynamics",
    publisher = "John Wiley \& Sons, Inc.",
    address  = "New Jersey, USA",
    edition  = "3",
    year      = "1991"
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{document}

According to \citet{jackson91}, blah blah...

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}