The paper isn&#x27;t suggesting &#x27;Anonymous et al. (2002, Nature)&#x27; style links. In fact, it addressed that concern directly:<p>&gt; It is suggested that, if using parenthetical referencing,  we are not referring to the author(s) any more but to a few title-keywords of the article and do not refer to the journals name. Those title-keywords can replace the authors’ names completely. They can be chosen by the author(s). Taking the APA citation style as an example, citing Nosek and Bar-Anan (2012) could look like this: &quot;...how to change scientific communication (e.g. Opening Scientific Communication, 2012)&quot;. The full reference should then be placed in the reference section together with other bibliographies starting with the letter O. The latter can be applied to the Vancouver citation system, too.<p>I happen to think it&#x27;s not a useful solution, because 1) &#x27;chosen by the author&#x27; is a free-text field open to all sorts of ways to hack the system, 2) names are easier to transliterate than titles are to translate, and 3) citations are often not made because of the main topic of the paper but can include also minor points which are later found to be more important. Using the author&#x27;s name is a more neutral link in that case.<p>(For example, I&#x27;ve seen a paper cited because there&#x27;s a one line comment about the software used to make an image in the publication. That software became popular, but there was no publication about the software itself, so people cited that first paper instead.)