Author–date system
A citation system where the in-text marker is the author's surname plus the year, and the reference list is alphabetical.
Author–date is the dominant system in the social sciences and much of the natural sciences: APA, Harvard, Chicago author–date, ASA, APSA. The in-text citation carries the author and year, which lets a reader judge recency and provenance without leaving the sentence.
It trades brevity for information. (Larsen, 2024) is longer than [4], but it tells you who and when, which matters when currency is part of the argument. The cost is that dense citation makes for cluttered prose.
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See also
Numeric citation systemA citation system where sources are numbered in order of first appearance and the in-text marker is that number.Notes-bibliography systemA citation system where the full citation lives in a footnote or endnote and the text carries only a superscript number.CSL (Citation Style Language)An open XML format for describing how a citation style formats references, used by Zotero, Mendeley, Paperpile, and this site.