There are some academic abbreviations that may be appropriate for inclusion in a paper that you've seen but couldn't quite grasp. Two of them have to do with looking elsewhere.
Do you know what "c.f." means? If I said it meant "confer," would that help? Confer means compare or contrast and comes from the prepositional prefix con plus the multipurpose Latin verb fero.
How about "q.v."? It means "quod vide," and translates as "which see," but also approximately means "compare". You can use q.v. if you want to make reference to something elsewhere in your paper. C.f. would be more appropriate for a comparison with an outside work.
