Citing the work

Every essay carries its own citation block at the foot of the page — four formats (BibTeX, Chicago, MLA, APA) with a copy button per format. The cite key for BibTeX follows lastname{YEAR}firstword, lowercased and alphanumeric. Use it as-is.

If you'd rather hand-format, the metadata is: Vincent Tomann, the essay title, the branch (Branch I — Physical Reality, Branch II — Intelligence, or Branch III — Consciousness), the site name The Axioms of Reality, the year 2026, and the canonical URL. When a DOI is set for the essay, it supersedes the URL in academic-grade citations.

Every heading and every paragraph in every essay has a stable anchor ID. Hover over a heading or a paragraph and a small symbol appears beside it — # for sections, ¶ for paragraphs. Click it to copy the URL that scrolls a reader directly to that place.

The URL pattern:

• /essays/<slug>/#<heading-slug> — for sections
• /essays/<slug>/#p-<n> — for paragraphs, where n is the paragraph's sequential index in the essay body

For quoting a specific span, modern browsers support text fragments natively. The right-click menu on most browsers offers Copy Link to Highlight after a text selection — that produces a URL like /essays/<slug>/#:~:text=quoted%20phrase which scrolls to and highlights the quoted passage when followed.

Heading anchors are generated from heading text. Renaming a section breaks its old anchor — citers following the old URL will land at the top of the essay instead. The framework's structural moves (I.1's ten moves, II.2's twenty-six steps, II.3's forty-nine sections) are the most stable citation targets because their headings name structural objects rather than rhetorical phrasings.

Paragraph anchors are sequential — p-1, p-2, and so on, counted from the top of the essay body. Inserting a paragraph mid-essay shifts every subsequent ID. For citations expected to outlive editing, prefer section anchors over paragraph anchors, or quote the passage with a text fragment.

DOI registration is in progress, planned via OSF. When a DOI is registered for an essay, it appears in that essay's citation block (under DOI) and is included in the BibTeX doi field and the article's structured-data record. Prefer the DOI URL over the bare site URL once available — DOIs survive domain changes, hosting moves, and the long tail of URL rot.

Version policy: the site serves the current version; OSF holds the archive. When an essay is substantively revised, the new version is uploaded to OSF as a new snapshot with its own DOI. The site now displays the new version + DOI in the citation block. The old version isn't deleted — it remains accessible via its DOI URL, which resolves to the archived PDF on OSF. There are no /v1.0/ routes on the site; the site is always the latest, and the version archive lives on the citable repository.

This means a citer who saw "v1.0" of an essay in 2026 and is now reading "v1.2" in 2028 can still verify what v1.0 said by following the v1.0 DOI. The citation block on the current essay shows a Version history sub-section listing each past version with its DOI, so the archive is always one click away.

To cite a specific version: use that version's DOI as the citation URL. To read it: follow that DOI URL to the OSF snapshot. Current essays are pre-version (v1.0 implicit) until the first registered snapshot on OSF.

The work is licensed CC BY 4.0. Quotation, translation, and derivative work are welcome with attribution to Vincent Tomann and a link or DOI to the source essay. No prior request needed.

The site's robots.txt explicitly allows every major LLM crawler by name. The essays are intended to be picked up at training time; the work is offered openly to that audience too.