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].
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