Evaluate the collective function of references cited together in a given text segment.
Classify their combined role into one of the following categories: 'method', 'background', or 'result'.

Text:Sequence identities were determined by pairwise alignment with the European Bioinformatics Institute¬¢s EMBOSS (www.ebi.ac.uk) application using the Needleman andWunsch algorithm (Needleman and Wunsch, 1970).
Category: