[Tex/LaTex] Citation call-outs appears as numbers between square brackets

bibliographiescitingnatbib

This is my very first post and I'm hoping that this won't break any rule. I've done previous research with nothing similar found on forum.

I'm currently working with natbib, BibTex and a .bst file obtained from de Geological Society of America.
The .bst file can be obtained here.

The style is pretty fine for my purposes, but I keep obtaining this:

Instead of getting something like (Ducea et al., 2004).

The command \citep would be generating the proper citation call-out, as the gsa.bst file says:

enter image description here

Also, the references appear in the bibliography with the hateful square brackets, and I have no clue from where delete them (don't mind the wrong number, just for illustrate purposes):

e

Also, I've noticed that my .blg file contains some errors:

This is BibTeX, Version 0.99dThe top-level auxiliary file: reftex.aux I found no \citation commands—while reading file reftex.aux I found no \bibdata command—while reading file reftex.aux I found no \bibstyle command—while reading file reftex.aux (There were 3 error messages)

I'm not sure where the reftex.aux file came from, but it contains the following:

\relax
\catcode "\active
\catcode<\active
\catcode `>\active
\@nameuse{es@quoting}
\babel@aux{spanish}{}

Aaaand my .bbl file is, well, empty.

I think that I correctly declared the natbib package and the reference style:

enter image description here
enter image description here

I'm stuck at this point. I've tried of running pdflatex>Bibtex>pdflatex>pdflatex in order to make BibTex work well, with no luck. Any help will be so welcomed!

Best Answer

The natbib package helps manage the "look" of citation call-outs, assuming a bibliography style is used that is compatible with the natbib package.

Fortunately, the JCKS bibliography style is fully compatible with natbib, as may be verified by the following passage, which starts at about line 20 of the style file:

 % This bibliography style file is intended for texts in ENGLISH
 % This is an author-year citation style bibliography. As such, it is
 % non-standard LaTeX, and requires a special package file to function properly.
 % Such a package is    natbib.sty   by Patrick W. Daly

All you need to do, then, is change the instruction

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

to 

\usepackage[authoryear,round]{natbib}

and re-run LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more to fully propagate all changes.

You can probably guess by now that "numbers" means "numeric-style citation call-outs and that "square" means "surround the numbers by square brackets". Conversely, "authoryear" means "authoryear-style citation call-outs" and that "round" means "use round parentheses in the outputs of \citet and \citep.

About the other error messages you report (errors in reftex.blg, empty reftex.bbl): Are you running BibTeX on the appropriate file? Assuming your main tex file is called myfile.tex and that that the bibliography file is called reftex.bib, you should be running bibtex myfile, not bibtex reftex.