Denote basically streamlines the creation of such files or file names while providing facilities to link between them (where those files are editable). In the past, the command denote-backlinks would produce a bespoke buffer showing a list of file names that included links to the current file (any file with the Denote file-naming scheme can have backlinks, by the way, including PDFs, videos, etc.). This means that, by default, org-store-link and anything building on top of it will create a link only to the current Denote file, like denote:IDENTIFIER , but not to the current heading within that file.