[texhax] citing authors without natbib

[jtzzaa11-texhax at yahoo.com]

Hi All,

Is there a way to cite in the text the authors of a reference without using natbib?. The problem is that sometimes there is a specific  bst file which must be used, but natbib uses its own bst files (plainnat etc.). I don't need author-year style citations, but just the authors' name, so something like:
blah \citeauthor{Smith1} showed that ...

which would yield

blah Smith et al. showed that ...

TIA,
Joel.