Normalising shared entities and applying constraints

I'm looking for a specific "best practice" or "pattern" concerning entities that are shared between different entities, having a relation to one of many.

For example, one may have the generic entity "Address", which could be used to store the common address fields for customers, suppliers, employees, etc...

Would a seasoned DBA take that route or would he rather add the fields to the corresponding entities? I'm also thinking about maintainability, constraints that may (in the future) differ depending on the entity, things like that.

I would love to get references to any authoritative or established works on the subject.