Give credit to somebody: give recognition, praise, approval
The credit of this discovery will be given to you.
Reference: act of referring, a mention
You should make a reference to a dictionary.
The book is full of references to places that I know well.
You see credits given to people at the end of movies. You do not refer to the source there. Similarly, people are given credit for discoveries made by them. You do not refer to the source here either.
But when you make a reference, you actually are referring to the source (i.e., it's location).
So, in your case, you should "make a reference" and not "give credit".
The Dartmouth College and McGraw-Hill documents you cite above are not guidelines for alphabetizing a glossary. They relate to storing records in a computer system. When storing official records, there are a variety of reasons to use official names instead of a nickname or more familiar abbreviation.
Whether you intermingle the acronyms with words, then, is the only real question, and that will depend somewhat on your audience and on the corpus you work with. Many dictionaries parcel off acronyms into a separate section entirely, and this may make sense if you have a relatively small number of acronyms, or if they will be looked up more often than other terms, and you want to make them easier to find.
I would generally advocate the mixed approach, treating acronyms as words, and listed together (i.e. ignoring capitalization) alphabetically, as per the "NSIO method."
The entire purpose of checking a glossary is to learn the meaning of a word you do not recognize; expecting someone to know the meaning of an acronym is utterly backwards. If we alphabetized abbreviations according to their long forms, anyone searching for MPT in a chemical glossary would be doomed never to learn that it is tetrahydromethanopterin, or be forced to skim every single term. In Internet parlance, it would be the Worst Glossary Evar.
As a small additional note, many abbreviations have been adopted as words in their own right— R.A.D.A.R. becoming radar and so forth. Even within an organization, jargon can become regularized in internal communications: in 2003 I might have been spelled out "Place client X on the Suspended for Non-Payment list," but by 2013 that might have become an exasperated "We need to snip client X again." So, a mixed approach may be slightly more "future-proof."
Best Answer
Where two words can be shown either separately or joined, as in host name and hostname, the two may exist side by side until one eventually becomes more popular. We have already seen the emergence of login as a single word, and the same may well happen here. The two citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, both from 1997, show host name. There are five records in the Corpus of Contemporary American English for host name, but only one for hostname.
Which you use yourself depends on any preference your organization may have and on the expectations of your readers. If in doubt, it’s probably wiser to take the conservative approach for the moment, and write host name.