Author-date systems create line noise that makes text hard to grok. Numeric systems (with or without footnotes) don’t have that problem. Honestly I don’t see the point of author-date. If a a paper is really important then it should be referenced in prose, otherwise “(Kowalchuck et al., 2018)” doesn’t tell you anything more than “[11]”; you’re still gonna need to look it up in the bibliography. And that looking up is actually made harder: finding [11] between [10] and [12] is easier than finding Kowalchuk between Kowal and Kowalski or whatever other names happen to be there.

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