Literary runaway: Increasingly more references cited per academic research article from 1980 to 2019
Open accessAbstract
References are employed in most academic research papers to give credits and to reflect scholarliness. With the upsurge in academic publications in recent decades, we are curious to know how the number of references cited per research article has changed across different disciplines over that time. The results of our study showed significant linear growth in reference density in eight disciplinary categories between 1980 and 2019 indexed in Web of Science. It appears that reference saturation is not yet in sight. Overall, the general increase in the number of publications and the advanced accessibility of the Internet and digitized documents may have promoted the growth in references in certain fields. However, the seemingly runaway tendency should be well appreciated and objectively assessed. We suggest that authors focus on their research itself rather than on political considerations during the process of writing, especially the selection of important references to cite.
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Reference lists have expanded rapidly across disciplines, making thorough manual verification unrealistic or infeasible.
“The growing scale of scholarly publishing further complicates this problem: reference lists have expanded rapidly across disciplines [12], making thorough manual verification unrealistic for”
From CiteAudit: You Cited It, But Did You Read It? A Benchmark for Verifying Scientific References in the LLM Era (2026) · cites this paper as [12]
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- Authors
- Dai, C., Chen, Q., Wan, T., Liu, F., Gong, Y., & Wang, Q.
- Affiliations
- Hubei University (CN)
- Fairy Lake Botanical Garden (CN)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Wuhan University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Wang, Qingfeng
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2021-08-06
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- e0255849
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8345841
- OpenAlex
- W3189135819
- Cited by
- 21
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 3
- FWCI
- 1.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Greater South Information System
- Funders
- Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2019CFA066)
- National Science & Technology Fundamental Resources Investigation Program of China (2019FY101800)
- Innovation of Science and Technology Commission of Shenzhen (JSGG20140515164852417, JCYJ201206151530054)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Keywords
- citation practices, reference density, disciplinary differences, Web of Science, scientific publication trends, scholarly communication
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Publications, Publishing, Research, Writing, Bibliometrics
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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