Bibtex, latex, elsarticle and nodots : meaningless error message

Just in case this could help someone else, here is a small record about why using latex and bibtex with the Elsevier article class and bibliography style model4-names.bst may lead to some headaches…

First, just using
\documentclass{elsarticle}
and
\bibliographystyle{model4-names}
\bibliography{myBiblio}
does not display the name of authors and the date, but just a number [1].

Solution : \documentclass[authoryear]{elsarticle} (from the sample file at http://support.river-valley.com/wiki/index.php?title=Model-wise_bibliographic_style_files)

The problem with this solution is that the author’s names are full of dots in the reference section (Smith, S.J., for example, instead of Smith SJ).
The solution provided here is to use the numcompress.sty package like this : \usepackage[nodots]{numcompress}

There I got a puzzling error and could not find a solution (this is why I publish this) :

(./MyBiblio.bbl [12]
Runaway argument?
467, 469\@nil \else \ifx \next \@@@au \bibauthor {467, 469}\else 467,\ETC.
! Paragraph ended before \@@bibpages was complete.
<to be read again>
                   \par
l.514

?

In MyBiblio.bib file, some @article items were not well-defined. I had to change pages = {185,190} to a correct pages = {185–190}, and remove a pages={3} as it seems to confuse the numcompress package.