Patents have long been identified by serial numbers. In theory, published articles could be so identified. The serial number has its obvious disadvantages as would an approach based on the use of secondary publication references, such as the volume and column number in Chemical Abstracts or the numbers in publications like the Current List of Medical Literature and the Bulletin Analytique. The disadvantages increase as one gets further away from the original complete citation.
Communication engineers face similar coding problems.
Both brevity and redundancy have shortcomings. It is necessary to determine the function of any proposed citation system. If a unique identification tag is all we require, then the patent system is enough. If the tag is to have mnemonic, as well as classificatory features, then the difficulties increase. It is questionable whether the space saved by reducing the already abbreviated citations compensates for the time lost in trying to identify the citations in published articles.