Searching by reference is available on a preliminary basis and users should read these instructions before trying it.

Many of the coins and other objects in the ANS database are labelled with references to standard catalogs. These references are usually very abbreviated and there is frequent overlap between departments. Many of these abbreviations will, however, be familiar to users. For example, 'ric' and 'bmc' in the Roman department are short for "The Roman Imperial Coins" and "British Museum Coins". The latter is in turn short for the cataloges of the Greek and Roman coins in the British Museum. 'km' is short for the various 'Krause-Mishler' publications. A '.' separates the abbreviation from the specific reference, as in 'ric.3' or 'km.13'. It is important to note that these references are frequently not unique for each coin type. 'km.12' can refer to many different coins so that adding the keyword 'sitamau' will restrict the results to the coins from that Indian mint. The wildcard symbol '*' can be used to search for coins from a particualr typology. For example, 'rpc*' will list all coins that refer to "Roman Provincial Coinage".