At a bare minimum, your LaTeX source file needs to contain these elements for \citeauthor
to work:
---- doc.tex
----
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
\begin{document}
\citeauthor{goossens93}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{doc}
\end{document}
---- doc.bib
----
@book{goossens93,
author = "Michel Goossens and Frank Mittlebach and Alexander Samarin",
title = "The LaTeX Companion",
year = "1993",
publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
address = "Reading, Massachusetts"
}
The correct compilation cycle for the document is then as follows:
latex doc
bibtex doc
latex doc
latex doc
The first compilation generates the list of cited works for BibTeX. Then BibTeX uses that information to generate a .bbl
file from doc.bib
containing all of the citations formatted according to the bibliography style you choose. The second compilation incorporates the .bbl
into the document, and the third compilation updates all of the cross-references (e.g. citations).
Here is the output for the example above:
