I am at a technical university where there are no templates and rules for writing a dissertation, especially not regarding the bibliography style. My supervisor prefers the author-year style, as it is a case with most publications in my field. After all, being in a small field with not so many researchers and papers, the paper behind a reference in the text such as "Smith et al. (2004)" is immediately obvious to a reader without checking the list in the back matter. However, for aesthetic and other reasons like my research being close to computer science, I prefer the numerical style which my supervisor does not approve. Hence, I am looking for a compromise in between the two. Does anyone have a recommendation for a style which would be in between, and its LaTeX/BibTeX implementation? My idea was to use something like:
In their research, Smith et al. [4-6] show that...
or:
In their 2004 paper [4], Smith et al. show...
I have seen also the footnote style, as a fusion between the two styles, but having >300 references would result in too much space used for the footnote area.
