LaTeX (beamer) — Is there a way to suppress the caption tag of “Figure X:” or “Table X:”

I haven’t really worked with the natbib package but I’d like to point you to the great biblatex package which offers a wide range of styles and it is — relatively — easy to configure your own style rules.

Well, the biblatex package seems also to have a natbib compatibility option, that defines some more natbib-like commands. Maybe you should start with

\usepackage[natbib=true, bibstyle=authoryear, citestyle=authoryear-comp]{biblatex}

and change the bibstyle and citestyle according to the documentation. Good luck with it.

You could also use the biblatex package which allows the date as an optional field on article.