Personally, I like my citations short and meaningful. Easy to skip over, but also easy to resolve if I care. That means something like [Aut19] where Aut is some

Personally, I like my citations short and meaningful. Easy to skip over, but also easy to resolve if I care. That means something like [Aut19] where Aut is some contraction of the author names, and 19 reffers to the year of publication. My issue with simpler citations like [13] is that it is hard to figure out whether two citations are to the same book. "Was [13] that reference to the horrible tome of complete mathematics, or was that [14]" "Was [15] the paper this is trying to generalize?". By creating a small amount of meaning, it becomes much easier to remember the actual reference. My issue with longer citations, is that I generally don't care about the source of a statement. When I am trying to follow an argument, I will just take the statement as fact, and focus on the big picture. Only when the fact is surprising, or when I have gotten the big picture, will I care about the reference. By having full inline citations in the argument, the text of the argument gets very bloated. Making it much harder to get the high level point of the argument. I can imagine this is a feature of very technical, close to mathematical proofs, kind of texts. For other fields, maybe this matter much less. Especially when 'truth' is a lot less objective, knowing the source of a statement becomes more important I guess.