I assume that you want to bold-face your cross-references to make them stand out strongly in the text. However, this is a dubious practice from a typographic point of view. Rather than bold-facing the cross-references, I'd suggest that you make them into hyperlinks that can be assigned a color. To do this, start by loading the hyperref package with the colorlinks
option set. Then, use the \autoref
command that's provided by the hyperref
package to create colored hyperlinks to the objects being cross-referenced. Note that the \autoref
command is what one might term fully dynamic: it typesets both the type (such as equation, figure, table, section, etc.) and the number of the cross-referenced object. By using the \autoref
command, the hyperlink "target" (the part that's colored) will be highly visible, because it consists of both the type and number of the item being cross-referenced.
An even more flexible and powerful cross-referencing command than \autoref
is \cref
, provided by the cleveref package; I suggest that you load the cleveref
package the nameinlink
option set. (Even if you do use \cref
, I still recommend you also load the hyperref
package with the colorlinks
option set. If you load both hyperref
and cleveref
, be sure to load hyperref
first.) Like \autoref
, \cref
is fully dynamic; the nameinlink
option forces the link to consist of both the item's type and number. Unlike \autoref
, \cref
lets you create cross-references to multiple items of the same type (e.g., equations) and even multiple items of differing types all in one cross-referencing command; the cleveref
package will nicely sort and typeset the cross-references being generated without the user having to worry about such details.
For much more on various cross-referencing commands and packages in general, and the hyperref
and cleveref
packages in particular, see the answers to the question Cross-reference packages: which to use, which conflict?