The most commonly used publication styles are created by the Modern Languages Association, the American Psychological Association, and the University of Chicago.
No matter what style your professor requests, a citation manager can help you organize and cite your sources, and so can a librarian.
See the Tri-College Libraries Citation Guide for specifications for each of these styles.
Author-Date format uses parenthetical in-text citations, and a reference list at the end of the work. This format is used by scholars in the social sciences and sciences. Here are examples for a book and a journal article:
(Smith 2016, 315–160)
(Satterfield 2016, 170)
Satterfield, Susan. 2016. “Livy and the Pax Deum.” Classical Philology 111,
no. 2 (April): 165–76.
Smith, Zadie. 2016. Swing Time. New York: Penguin Press.
For more examples, see the full Author-Date style guide.