Reference  

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In general, a reference is something that refers to or designates something else, or acts as a connection or a link between two things. The objects it links may be concrete, such as books or locations, or abstract, such as data, thought, or memories. The object which is named by a reference, or to which the reference points, is the referent.

The term 'reference' is used with different specialized meanings in a variety of fields, as follows:

Semantics

In semantics, reference is generally construed as the relation between nouns or pronouns and objects that are named by them. Hence the word John refers to John. The word it refers to some previously specified object. The object referred to is called the referent of the word. Sometimes the word-object relation is called denotation; the word denotes the object. The converse relation, the relation from object to word, is called exemplification; the object exemplifies what the word denotes. In syntactic analysis, if a word refers to a previous word, the previous word is called the antecedent.

Reference and Meaning

Frege argued that reference cannot be treated as identical with meaning: "Hesperus" (an ancient Greek name for the evening star) and "Phosphorus" (an ancient Greek name for the morning star) both refer to Venus, but the astronomical fact that '"Hesperus" is "Phosphorus"' can still be informative, even if the 'meanings' of both "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are already known. This problem led Frege to distinguish between the sense and reference of a word.

Absent Referent

Words can often be meaningful without having a referent. Fictional and mythological names such as "Bo-Peep" and "Hercules" illustrate this possibility.

Following from the argument that one cannot directly experience the divine (e.g. God), the sign "God" can serve as an example of a reference with an absent referent. Additionally, certain sects of Judaism and other religions consider it sinful to write, discard, or deface the name of the divine. To avoid this problem, the signifier G-d is sometimes used, which is a sign which refers to another sign with an absent referent.

In Mathematics, the absent referent can be seen with the symbol for zero, "0" or the empty set, "{ }".

Vegan feminist Carol Adams has leveraged the notion of the absent referent to explain a possible psycho-social detachment which may occur in people who eat meat--i.e., between the consumer (self) and the consumed (other). This argument relies on an implicit presupposition that if people regained a connection to the organisms which serve as the sources of food, or if they understood the violence involved in its slaughter, meat consumption would decrease.

Linguistic Sign

The semantic sign can be considered a subset of a more general concept, the linguistic sign, first elucidated by Ferdinand de Saussure‎. A sign contains two parts, the signified (a thought which represents an object), and the signifier (the sound or written word). Both have a referent (the actual physical object).

Art

In Art, a reference is an item from which a work is based. This may include an existing artwork, a reproduced (i.e. photo) or directly observed (i.e. person) object, or the artist's memory.

Libraries

In a library, the word reference may refer to a dictionary, encyclopedia, or other reference work that contains many brief articles that cover a broad scope of knowledge in one book, or a set of books. However, the word reference is also used to mean a book that cannot be taken from the room, or from the building. Many of the books in the reference department of a library are reference works, but some are books that are simply too large or valuable to loan out. Conversely, selected reference works may be shelved with other circulating books, and may be loaned out.

References to any type of printed matter come in electronic or at least machine-readable form nowadays. For books there exists the ISBN, for journal articles, the digital object identifier (DOI) is gaining relevance. Printed information on the Internet is usually referred to by some kind of uniform resource identifier (URI).

Scholarship

In scholarship, a reference may be a citation of a text that has been used in the creation of a piece of work such as an essay, report, or oration. Its primary purpose is to allow people who read such work to examine the author's sources, either for validity, or simply to learn more about the subject. Such items are often listed at the end of an article or book in a section marked Bibliography or in a section marked References. A Bibliography section will often contain work not cited by the author, but used as background reading or listed as potentially useful to the reader. A section labelled References should contain all and only work cited in the main text. In some circles the latter is known as the EC250 Rule.

Copying of material by another author without proper citation or without required permissions amounts to 'plagiarism'.

Personal references

In the labour market, a reference is a letter to a prospective employer regarding a job applicant's characteristics. Usually the person providing the reference - the referee - is a previous boss, or someone of some distinction in government, the clergy, or education, who can personally vouch for the applicant's employability; see also credit reference.

See also

• Antecedent (grammar)
• Exemplification
• Generic antecedents
• Library reference desk
• List of reference tables
• Reference work
• Self-reference