Do you say, “Friend did some­thing once [Friend, 2000], and I want to talk about it with you now…”? Or, “As was shown with ele­gance and poise in [Friend, 1998], it is clear…”? Or do you go for the tele­graphic faint praise approach, with “Friend [1988] pub­lished a num­ber of papers touch­ing on this topic, but sev­eral impor­tant ques­tions have arisen since…”?

I ask, because a col­league asked me to read his draft NSF grant pro­posal today, and he decided to sim­ply use num­bers in brack­ets. As nouns, some proper. No names, no nuthin’ — to save space. I real­ized it’s not that far from the stan­dards men­tioned above, but far enough to raise an eye­brow or two.

update: The tone of the com­ments makes me real­ize that per­haps I was unclear. Here’s an exam­ple of the sort of sen­tence my col­league was using:

[14] has done a great deal of work on this sub­ject, and hangs out with [5] at [6] all the time, so maybe we should ask them both to explain [7].

Descrip­tion of Com­plex Sys­tems in terms of Self-​​Organization Processes of Prime Inte­ger Relations