I have been looking at LaTeX packages for PhD theses, most closely at the Dalhousie package, the Stanford package, and the UCLA package.
Dalhousie and Stanford uses the "plain" bibliography style, which means that references in text are as short as possible as[1]. For such a long text as a PhD thesis it would force the reader to have to continuously search the Bibliography in the end. The UCLA packages givesMore... another type of abbreviation in text, like [Bar03], ie taking the first three letters of the author name and the year of publication.
I prefer the Chicago style, often used in humanities which gives (Bartle, 2003). This can be accomplished by using another bibliography style such as "authordate". In order for this to work one need to let the LaTeX printer have access to the appropriate .bst file, for example authordate1.bst.
If one sticks with using 'authordate' and want to be able to in some cases print out both the name and the year (Bartle, 2003) and in other cases only print the year (2003) one also need to let the system access the style file "authordate1-4.sty".
After some experimenting with the packages the following additions to the main file thesis.tex in the Dalhousie package gave me the functionality is sought:
In the beginning of the file, where packages are imported, add:
\usepackage{authordate1-4}
and in the end, before you refer to your library file, add:
\bibliographystyle{authordate1}
Useful resources:
Examples of bibliography styles
authordate package at CTAN
dalthesis -- Dalhousie University Thesis Document Class
Stanford University latex thesis style file
The UCLA Thesis Style for LaTeX
