Usually, in academic texts you cite stuff and at the end there is the bibliography that contains the full entries for all things referenced in the text. But there are some situations where you want to list some complete bibliography entries beforehand, somewhere in the text. For example you may want a list of prior work somewhere near the beginning of a grant proposal or a list of things published during the grant period somewhere at the end, but separate from the bibliography. Of course, you can write this list by hand, but where would be the fun in that?

And of course there is a LaTeX package for that, bibentry. You include the package with your bibliography style in the preamble. You can include it together with natbib.

\bibliographystyle{apalike} % or any other style you like
\usepackage{natbib} % optional, but combination is possible
\usepackage{bibentry}

Then, also in the preamble, you "turn off" the regular bibliography with \nobibliography. After that you can create your list of stuff somewhere in the document, but you will not have a bibliography at the end. Which is probably not what you want. So to additionally be able to include the references in the usual way, use this snippet:

\nobibliography*
\let\oldthebibliography=\thebibliography
\let\endoldthebibliography=\endthebibliography
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
   \begin{oldthebibliography}{#1}%
   \setlength{\parskip}{0ex}%
   \setlength{\itemsep}{0ex}%
}%
{%
   \end{oldthebibliography}%
}

The citing commands (\cite, \citep, etc.) and what they produce are unchanged, but now you can use \bibentry at any point in the text to create the full bibliographic entry. The formatting will be the same as for the references in the bibliography:

Parts of this work have been published in: \bibentry{Kessler2014}