The phrase "a sort of reference" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing something that serves as an informal or vague indication or source of information.
Example: "The book provides a sort of reference for understanding the historical context of the events."
Alternatives: "a kind of reference" or "a type of reference".
He created a time-stamp to correlate arrival time of the photon with the electron spin, which provided a sort of reference key for each photon to confirm its correlation to the source electron.
The prisoners are used as a sort of reference work, as a means of checking new names that come up in the hearings, or as a catalyst toward achieving a better understanding of how fundamentalists think.
Today, a hotel's "rack rate," the retail price listed for a given room, is just "a sort of reference point," said Sherri Kimes, a professor at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.
"It's theft" he says in the interview, making no bones about how he views others using Apple as a sort of reference model for their own device designs.
The reason was that this combination represents a sort of reference point, since preclinical and clinical studies have shown synergy in a broad range of tumours including pancreatic cancer (Adjei et al, 2000; Giovannetti et al, 2004; Dy et al, 2005; Oettle et al, 2005).
The other, Greenberg's, posited an inevitability of formal development in painting, through progressive styles that were ever more attuned to the medium's material givens of flatness and pigmentation and ever more averse to any sort of reference or illusion.
"Unfortunately, over time, everyone has become so separate, that they have built a sort of fear reference to certain communities," he said.
I know I'm not alone in my love for the THPS soundtracks either; they've become a sort of cultural reference, entering the nostalgia canon for my generation, with playlists littering YouTube decades after the games were released.
In order to uncover a way to destroy the hate plague, Optimus Prime searches for the answers in the Autobots' "Matrix of Leadership," which is a vessel containing the accumulated wisdom of Autobot leaders past, a sort of historical reference -- the living embodiment on the idea of learning from the past as a means to prevent the same mistakes in the future.
Reznor described the band's early intentions for the project as "an experiment", and explained the group's process: "When we started working with the music, we would generally start with a sort of visual reference that we had imagined: a place, or a setting, or a situation.
But for the media to use this movie as a sort of all-purpose reference whenever anyone with autism hits the news is the same as associating all LBGT people with the cast of the seventies musical La Cage aux Folles.
