Here's a recent subthread on this question: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2021-07/msg00233.html
At the end of that discussion, my argument against using citations for cross-references: 1. Cross-references are not citations, neither conceptually, nor in software implementations. In LaTeX, MS Word, Libre office, InDesign, etc, cross-references are handled differently than citations. There, they are typed internal links. You can get a sense of how this works in this tutorial for Word, which includes a list of cross-reference types, and so hints at the range of things people need to internally reference: https://www.customguide.com/word/how-to-cross-reference-in-word 2. As John and Joost noted on that thread, because they're different, they raise a range of implementation questions, most notably for me what org-cite processors are supposed to do with these citations that are not citations. As it is now, the user would just get errors and/or unexpected output. On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 1:28 AM Tom Gillespie <tgb...@gmail.com> wrote: ... > Actually, having written this now, I think that both solutions have > their own use cases. Org cite is clearly about providing evidence for, > or a scholarly reference for something, and critically it can embed > some metadata about that reference in the document as a citation or > perhaps as an excerpt (and extension of what org-ref does now when the > cursor is over a reference?). Regular links do not provide any way to > embed metadata within the document, they are purely pointers. Right, which is what a cross-reference is. It's just there needs to be some way to distinguish among types of targets, I think. > I think it would be a mistake to use up equation/eq and table/tbl or > figure/fig prefixes for references that are internal to org, because it > implicitly > limits/collides with the #+link: keyword. Is there a workaround for this somehow, or an alternative that gets the same thing in the end? Bruce