Literally, a reference is a document cited in the writing process, such as an article or a book. However, according to the definition of GB/T 77 14-20 15, the reference after the text refers to the relevant literature information resources cited for writing or editing papers and works.
According to the requirements of China Academic Journals (CD-ROM Edition) Retrieval and Evaluation Data Standard (Trial) and China Social Science Journals Arrangement Standard (Revised Edition), many publications distinguish between references and annotations, and define annotations as "words that further explain or supplement a certain content in a text", which are listed at the end of the article, separated from references or placed at the footer.
On August 20, 2007, a symposium on the layout specification of comprehensive humanities and social sciences academic journals was held in Tsinghua University, and it was decided that some journals would implement the new specification "Technical Specification for Citation of Comprehensive Journals" from 2008.
This technical specification summarizes the "annotation" style and "author-publication year" style of literature citation. The word "reference" is no longer used. These two kinds of literature description or citation norms have great influence in China, and the latter is mainly used in higher-level academic journals of humanities and social sciences.