writing - Where to locate authors’ names in sentences?

Is it or is it not good practice to make an author the subject of sentences in a paper? When should their name be central, discreet, or absent in the sentence? Here are five variations showing different approaches, four of which include the author’s name. Are there particular identifiable use cases for these styles?

1. Johnson argued that this will never work.


2. Per Johnson, this will never work.


3. The argument was advanced by Johnson that this will never work.


4. This will never work (Johnson).


5. This will never work [42].

Answer

There is more here than style: the first and third options mean something quite different from the fourth and fifth. In the former cases, what you are asserting is that someone else argued for X. In the latter cases, you are asserting X and using the citation as evidence/support/proof. (That I can't quite tell where the second one fits into this dichotomy is a strike against it.) In an academic paper, that is a not so subtle difference.

I find the style question less critical. It is a matter of general good writing rather than anything specifically academic or it is specific to the journal at hand (so we need not discuss it here).

Of course you can use an author's name as a subject of a sentence: you can write what you want, you know! As a matter of style, to my ear the first option sounds good, the second option sounds weird, and the third option sounds weaker and wordier than the first, but maybe the surrounding text gives you a good reason to write it that way.

The difference between options 4 and 5 is just a difference in citation style. First that is very field dependent; in my field (mathematics), we would do 5 rather than 4; in much of the humanities it would be the other way around. Second, unless your choice is so so strange that it prevents your readers from finding the references in your bibliography, the whole issue can probably wait until your paper gets accepted, in which case they'll either do it for you, tell you exactly what to do, or tell you that you did it wrong (and ask you to fix it).