A citation is not a first-class participant in a sentence; it cannot serve as a noun phrase. Rather it is a parenthetical — that is why it appears in parentheses — and like all parentheticals should be removable without changing the well-formedness of the sentence in which it appears. Thus, the following sentences are ill-formed. (Try reading them without the material in parentheses.)
- The reader is referred to (Dewey et al., 1756) for further details.
- (Dewey et al., 1756) describes the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
- In (Farmer, 1987), it is shown how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
- (Farmer, 1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
- Many researchers have followed the research methodology described in (Farmer, 1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
The following versions should be used instead:
- The reader is referred to the early work of Dewey et al. (1756) for further details.
- Dewey et al. (1756) describe the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
- Farmer (1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
- Many researchers have followed the research methodology described by Farmer (1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
- Many researchers have followed a research methodology for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment (Farmer, 1987).
(Note that “Dewey et al.” serves as a plural noun phrase.) The BibTeXfullname style file and associated TeX style provide support for generating references like these. They are available with accompanying documentation at URL ftp://ftp.das.harvard.edu/pub/shieber/fullname/.