Reference

References can take on many forms, including: a thought, a sensory perception that is audible (onomatopoeia), visual (text), olfactory, or tactile, emotional state, relationship with other,[1] spacetime coordinates, symbolic or alpha-numeric, a physical object, or an energy projection.

[citation needed] References feature in many spheres of human activity and knowledge, and the term adopts shades of meaning particular to the contexts in which it is used.

These could be the agent (actor) and patient (acted on), as in "The man washed himself", the theme and recipient, as in "I showed Mary to herself", or various other possible combinations.

For books, there exists the ISBN and for journal articles, the Digital object identifier (DOI) is gaining relevance.

The main proposition is that "All behavior is oriented all of the time around the control of certain quantities with respect to specific reference conditions.

"[5] In academics and scholarship, a reference or bibliographical reference is a piece of information provided in a footnote or bibliography of a written work such as a book, article, essay, report, oration or any other text type, specifying the written work of another person used in the creation of that text.

The primary purpose of references is to allow readers to examine the sources of a text, either for validity or to learn more about the subject.

In contrast, a bibliographical section often contains works not cited by the author, but used as background reading or listed as potentially useful to the reader.

However, scholars have studied methods of reference because of their key role in communication and co-operation between different people, and also because of misunderstandings that can arise.

[6] In patent law, a reference is a document that can be used to show the state of knowledge at a given time and that therefore may make a claimed invention obvious or anticipated.