The structure of a citation under the author–date method is the author's surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as in "(Smith 2010, p. 1)".
An example of a journal reference: Following is an explanation of the components, where the coloring is for demonstration purposes and is not used in actual formatting:
An example of a newspaper reference: The origin of the author–date style is attributed to a paper by Edward Laurens Mark, Hersey professor of anatomy and director of the zoological laboratory at Harvard University, who may have copied it from the cataloguing system used then and now by the library of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
[13] In 1881 Mark wrote a paper on the embryogenesis of the garden slug, in which he included an author–date citation in parentheses on page 194, the first known instance of such a reference.
The festschrift pays tribute to Mark's 1881 paper, writing that it "introduced into zoology a proper fullness and accuracy of citation and a convenient and uniform method of referring from text to bibliography."
prefaces the page numbers and main words in titles appear in capital letters, following MLA style guidelines.)