This chapter introduces the broad and multidisciplinary field of referring and reference, including perspectives from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. In this chapter we review some of the key contributions from these disciplines to explain the main background of influences that are still relevant to our understanding of reference and acts of referring. We then discuss traditional approaches to reference from the perspectives of text and discourse, focussing on the concepts of coreference and anaphor, and how these accounts have helped shape but also, to some extent, have limited text-based reference. Contributions from cognitive perspectives, including the role of shared information and the concept of givenness is shown to enrich our understanding of reference. The chapter establishes the reasons why reference must be viewed as addressee orientated, collaborative, and context-dependent. In doing so, we set out the reasons why an integrated approach to reference is needed.