The phrase "a reference was made" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when indicating that someone has mentioned or alluded to something in a discussion or document.
Example: "During the meeting, a reference was made to the previous report that outlined our findings."
Alternatives: "a mention was made" or "an allusion was made".
When the European Union's constitutional treaty was being negotiated, there were hard arguments over whether to mention Christianity or God; in the end, a reference was made to the "cultural, religious and humanist inheritance" of Europe.
In the prototype system, a reference was made to a single processing tool (identifier), because one processing implementation was capable of performing quality evaluation for all of the evaluated quality attributes.
A computerized search for the word 'gang' in all the stories coded as Othering revealed that in 90% of the stories where the word was found, a reference was made to a racialized group.
The bacteria associated with the parasitic helminths were identified and to assess their role as potential vectors a reference was made with previous publications to determine if they have been previously denoted as pathogenic or not.
As this paper is a sequel to an earlier paper on "Epigenetic Hereditary Transcription Profiles" a reference was made to this paper both for the rationale of the choice of the 14 genes of the 20S proteasome and for the use of the "mean transcription profile" as tool.
The setting may be an apartment they shared or, because a reference is made to the games room, a group home of some kind.
A reference is made to North American Specification for the design of cold-formed steel structural members [3] as well, where a slightly better design methodology is available.
A reference is made in the document to the showdown with Andy Flower, the then coach, before the fifth Test in Sydney that Pietersen describes in detail in his autobiography, but it also covers many other incidents that are not mentioned in the book.
During the evaluation of a policy, when a reference is made to a property of an entity (e.g., where of type object), this will result in consulting the Jano platform for the requested information.
In your story on "Espionage" (March 19), a reference is made to "a cheap apartment in West Hollywood". I find this quite amazing.
In the banquet scene, a reference is made to a famous actress named Mary Pikefort, an allusion to the real-life actress Mary Pickford.
