How to have a system of referencing citations so that it is short and well-styled I am familiar with writing the citation part (in different styles). However, I have typically just used superscripts like Wikipedia to reference the citation, like this[1] sort of thing. I would like to get more advanced with it to make it easier for the reader to glean more information from the citation reference.

So I'm thinking something like this (Glen89) where author is Glen and year of publication is 89. But then what if there are multiple publications in 89 for Glen, then it would be perhaps (Glen89a) and (Glen89b).

But that isn't too descriptive. I have seen some cases where they list the publisher as well, like (Glen: MacMillan 89), but that is too long and specific to books.

In general I'm wondering the rules for how to do this, and wondering where I can get some inspiration for how to write these, if not a straight answer here on what a good style is.
Don't reinvent the wheel: There are existing systems that collect bibliographic data and then produce the appropriate citation in the text. Bibtex and Microsoft Endnote are the most widely used ones. How the citation in the text appears is controlled by "style files" that are often different between journals, but every journal has its own preferred style that you should use.