Odd - do you use parentheses instead of square brackets? All the stuff I’m familiar with uses square brackets, which is more distinct. Before laser printers doing superscripts was a pain, and cause an extra half space between lines.
The IEEE magazines that use superscripts are re-typeset, and are edited by a real editor. Conference articles aren’t. Actually, hard copy of conference proceedings are disappearing, which allows authors to use color. I suppose links will be there soon.
I find this amusing, considering the incomprehensible mess that passes for English in most English communications.
[/tech writing grad]
One of my rhetoric professors said she once had a paper rejected from a English conference because it was too readable, so it didn’t sound impressive enough.
On preview, what asterion said.
OTOH, I had no idea what the heck MLA and Turabian meant. Or APA. Whenever I was submitting or copy-editing a submission for a journal, I’d check their specific rules.
Voyager, the fact that it’s superscript is distinctive enough. Many international typewriters (the method of choice until not so long ago) did not have or {}; those citation rules are older than MSOffice.
Cite? 
All scientific papers I’ve looked at have used the superscript or [1] citation style; it’s certainly very common in physics and computer science. I’d seen MLA being used, but never heard the terms MLA or Turabian until I opened this thread - learn something new every day and all that.