I wrote a risk assessment of the Heroku platform in Latex this term. It was my first large report using Latex, I ran into the following error and it look me a long time to figure out.
Runaway argument?
Author(Year{\natexlab {{}})]{natbib_key} Author. \newblock Author u\ETC.
! Paragraph ended before \@lbibitem was complete.
<to be read again>
\par
l.257
What this means is that the you cited more than 26 time for the same Author in the same year (Heroku, 2015). The problem was this: \bibliographystyle{plainnat}. This style, quite reasonably, sets the letter limit. Too bad the error message is just so awful.
The key step was opening up .bbl file and see to see \natexlab {{}} where the {{}} were missing a letter - vs the earlier citations.
##TL;DR
- \bibliographystyle{plainnat}
+ \bibliographystyle{abbrv}
abbrv is likely the correct format anyway for scientific publications and is likely already in your class file (but I didn't have one of these).