Different disciplines value and focus on different things when it comes to citing; no one format will work for everyone.

Professions/Disciplines using a PARENTHETICAL citation style:

• Author-page styles
  • MLA
    • Why?
      • Emphasizes page number or other markers because they do a LOT of quoting
• Harvard (author-date) styles
  • APA
  • Chicago author-date
  • CSE Name-Year
    • Why?
      • They either emphasize how current the information they're citing is
      • And/or focus on how ideas/ways of thinking about a topic evolve over time

Professions/Disciplines using a NUMBERED citation style:

• Oxford (footnote/endnote) styles, such as
  • Chicago Notes
    • Why?
      • The kinds of sources they cite don't fit neatly into a brief parenthetical citation.
• Vancouver (numbered sequence) styles, such as
  • AMA
  • IEEE
  • CSE Citation-Sequence
  • CSE Citation-Name
    • Why?
      • They cite a LOT of studies - so they do just numbers to not clog up the text