Narrative citation
Also called: prose citation
An in-text citation where the author's name is part of your sentence and only the date or page stays in brackets.
A narrative citation weaves the author into the grammar: “Larsen (2024) found that peer review slows publication by a median of 14 weeks.” The name is doing work in the sentence, so only the year remains bracketed. Remove the brackets and the sentence breaks — that is what distinguishes it from a parenthetical citation.
Narrative citations are how you build a conversation between sources. They let you write “Larsen (2024) reports X, but Okafor (2019) found the opposite,” which is much harder to do gracefully with brackets alone. Most style guides encourage mixing both forms so paragraphs do not end in a wall of parentheses.