I have previously written about why I dislike footnotes. Here, I explain why I dislike numbered citations.

Numbered citations

Consider this text fragment (from this paper):

alt text

Here, the numbered citations are not helpful. You need to scroll to the end of the paper to figure out wat they mean. In practice, I only do that when I really want to check the reference. Most of the time, I just ignore the citations.

Author-year citations

Compare that to this fragment (from this paper) using the author-year citation style:

alt text

Here one can easily see the names of who is being cited, which immediately gives more context to the text. It affords reading the text without having to look up the reference list.

Saving space

Some argue that numbered citations save space. That may be true in some cases, but I also find that one actually needs more space to convey what one wants to say. For example, in the paper mentioned above, we had to write out the author’s names in addition to the numbered citation for the text to be meaningful:

alt text

This actually wastes space. In any case, the time of physical papers is long gone. There is no reason to keep bad publication habits from the past. It is a good idea to keep papers as short as possible, but they should also be as long as necessary to convey enough information to make for an efficient read.