I am asking in regards to the European Union ERC grants but this could apply to any grant application with no set guidelines for references formatting.
The ERC guideline states: "Please use a reference style that is commonly used in your discipline such as American Chemical Society (ACS) style, American Medical Association (AMA) style, Modern Language Association (MLA) style, etc. and that allows the evaluators to easily retrieve each reference"
Two of these are numeric the third is the author name (Smith et al. 2020). Personally I don't think the numeric citation style allows for "easily retrieve" because it requires to go back and forth between text and references. In my discipline there is no commonly used style, but I have seen often the numeric style used to save space in grant applications.
Do grant reviewers prefer name style citations? Will they get annoyed by the numeric style or should I assume that everybody uses them so there will be no penalty for using it?