A reference within a TEXT, broadly conceived, to another text, also broadly conceived. The text may contain citations that vary by the degree to which they explain their own referentiality: from the explicit (such as quotation, footnote, endnote, or epigraph) to the implicit (such as paraphrase, allusion, imitation, or homage). Professions tend to require explicit citations for certifying specific claims; they may also encourage implicit citations to ensure that an author belongs to his/her community and shares its range of experience and interest. Within ACADEMIA, citations represent measures of pertinent evidence and access points to relevant information. Citations are increasingly used in the HUMANITIES (they have operated in this way in the sciences for some time) as quantifiable metrics of a scholar’s significance: to be much cited is to exist more within a given discipline, or more thoroughly to have permeated its corporate body, in something of the way in which a dominant allele can be said to have achieved “prominence” in a given population. Standards of citation differ according to field, being enforced (without violence) by journals, presses, and professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association or the American Psychological Association. These norms thereby come to shape the identity of the scholar and of scholarship. By design, they indicate (and can even be said to constitute) the author’s grasp of existing scholarship in his/her DISCIPLINE, and they encourage him/her to “advance” the body of knowledge involved. Such advancement, interestingly, tends to mean the de-citation, over time, of texts once understood to be obligatory citations within the discipline. In this way, the citation is a device whereby a scholar contributes to the semi-autonomous and depersonalized progress of knowledge itself (see KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION). And yet the citation also preserves the romantic ideal of individual intellectual genius. The attempt to eliminate ambiguity from the field of reference reinforces the primacy of the author as such—this especially in the humanities, where multi-author publications are scarce. The whole phenomenon is perhaps best witnessed in the culture industry. There, citation is ubiquitous, yet rarely acknowledged. This is the case in visual media such as television, film, and photography, in which the artist cannot—or need not—rely on the quotation mark or like device to distinguish borrowed from original material. One might argue that such media call into question the fixity of textual reference; or one might argue that they reveal textual reference for what it is. For the culture industry confronts “citation” in a narrow sense only at the abstract and distant boundary of copyright infringement, which requires an enormous amount of capital (in addition to compelling argumentation) to litigate. Within the triangular network of producer, consumer, and commodity, the citation reverts to its ancestral form: property.