Q. When using the author-date style, can I put two citations to one sentence like the following?
At that time, no one, including the show’s producers Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon, could have anticipated the sudden “Simpsons craze” that was to come (IMDb 2026) (Henry 1994, 87).
If not, how else could I do this? Only the names of the producers were taken from IMDb while the claim of fame is from Henry 1994.
A. It’s best not to try to cite separate parts of the same sentence unless it’s perfectly clear what each citation refers to; in your example, we can’t really tell which part is from IMDb and which is from Henry.
But first, there are some other issues that should probably be addressed in your example. We’ve done some digging and determined that your “Henry 1994” almost certainly refers to the following article:
Henry, Matthew. 1994. “The Triumph of Popular Culture: Situation Comedy, Postmodernism and The Simpsons.” Studies in Popular Culture 17 (1): 85–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23413793.
Henry, however, does not seem to use the phrase “Simpsons craze” in that article (or the word “craze” by itself)—not on page 87 or elsewhere. Perhaps you’re drawing on this passage from page 87:
The Simpsons was, therefore, inevitable, the next logical step in the blue-collar tradition; its enormous success, however, was quite unexpected.
If that’s the case, then you shouldn’t put “Simpsons craze” in quotation marks. Some people probably referred to that show’s huge popularity in that way, but your source refers to an “enormous success,” not a craze.
Next, if it’s your own claim that the show’s producers could not have predicted the show’s success (something that Henry’s article doesn’t seem to address either), then you need to make that clear.
As for the identity of the producers, The Simpsons has had such a long run that according to IMDb (on its page for the full cast and crew), it’s had more than 150 producers to date. Moreover, the three people you list are credited at IMDb as the show’s creators, not its producers.
Taking all that into account, here’s one way that you might revise the sentence in your question (assuming you have a reason for introducing the creators at this point and that you’ve established elsewhere that you’re talking about the show’s earliest days):
According to Henry (1994), the show’s “enormous success . . . was quite unexpected.” And though Henry does not mention them, the show’s creators—James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, and Sam Simon (IMDb 2026)—were likely among those taken by surprise.
Make sure that “IMDb 2026” in your reference list includes the link to the main page for the show (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096697/), where the creators are listed. (But note that at IMDb’s page for the full cast and crew, only Groening gets a creator credit; Brooks and Simon are credited, along with Groening, as developers, one more thing you may want to consider when revising your text.)
Finally, if you were to cite two sources at the end of a sentence, you’d usually do that when both sources supported the same idea, in which case you’d separate them with a semicolon: (IMDb 2026; Henry 1994). See also CMOS 13.116.