referência

Referència is a Catalan term meaning a reference or citation, and it also denotes the act or result of referring to something. It can indicate a source used to support a statement or point to additional information.

In scholarly work, a referència is a citation or bibliographic reference. It shows the provenance of an idea or fact, allowing verification and credit to the original author. References appear in the main text as citations and in a references or bibliography section, and may take the form of footnotes or endnotes. A standard bibliographic reference typically includes author, title, edition or volume, place of publication, publisher, year, and identifiers such as ISBN, DOI, or URL. Styles such as APA, MLA, and Chicago regulate the format.

In libraries and archives, referències help locate materials and establish cross-links between catalog records. In cataloging, a product reference or reference number identifies a specific item in a collection or catalog.

In computing, referència can denote a reference or pointer to an object in memory or a variable in programming languages.

In everyday language, "referència" can mean a point of comparison, an exemplar, or the source to which one refers when describing something.

Thus referència covers multiple senses, all centering on pointing to and providing traceability to an origin or source. The term is central to academic integrity, information retrieval, and cataloging, and also appears in technical contexts to denote pointers or identifiers.