unique ids and titles. If you're familiar with the field, you've certainly seen paper 24601 cited many times and probably read it yourself. If you are unfamilia

unique ids and titles. If you're familiar with the field, you've certainly seen paper 24601 cited many times and probably read it yourself. If you are unfamiliar, you look at the title "Effects of harsh prison sentences on recidivism". Works well enough for industry standards, laws, product SKUs, engineering drawings, patents, etc. Hell even libraries work this way. The only advantage of citing by author is if people are actually completely unfamiliar with the paper but are familiar with other works by the author and just guess that the work is related and of similar quality, but this is problematic both because it's incredibly unscientific to just accept something based on authority, and if your lead author is a grad student with few publications to their name you probably aren't familiar with them anyways.