How do I emit the text content of a reference in LaTeX?

I have a section:

\section{Introduction} \label{sec:introduction}

I'd like a link to the section where the link text is the name of the section. I can use hyperref:

The \hyperrf[sec:introduction]{Introduction} introduces the paper.

But that requires repeating the section title ("Introduction"). Is there a way to grab that? ref yields the section number, which isn't right. autoref yields "section " and then the section number, which isn't right, either.

Solution

There are a couple of packages that provide this for you. nameref is distributed as part of hyperref to do this:
https://ctan.org/pkg/nameref

There is a more general package for cross-referencing basically anything, called zref: https://ctan.org/pkg/zref

It's by the same author as hyperref, Heiko Oberdiek; it's the one that I would choose. Here's an example:

\documentclass[oneside,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[user,titleref]{zref}
\begin{document}
\section{Introduction of sorts.}\zlabel{sec:intro}
Hello
\subsection{Structure}
We begin in `\ztitleref{sec:intro}'.
\end{document}

Note that it even removes the trailing period in the section title.