Literary runaway: Increasingly more references cited per academic research article from 1980 to 2019

Abstract

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.

Open Science: What’s not to like?

“…We have to read more now, for example, or at least pretend to. So reference lists have grown longer, with a study of 30 disciplines in the Web of Science averaging 29 per paper in 2003 and 45 in 2019, with no sign of levelling off (Dai et al, 2021). More seriously, the tools which allow us to create, access and distribute our work also enable others to assess it, producing a relentless and unforgiving numerically-driven assessment culture.…”

Assessing citation integrity in biomedical publications: corpus annotation and NLP models

“…Citation integrity errors are difficult to detect, because they require the reader, editor, or peer reviewer to be very familiar with the cited article and be able to judge whether the cited information is consistent with the original text. Given that an article on average cites about 45 articles ( Dai et al 2021 ) and the judgment requires expertise, this is a challenging task. In this article, we pose the question of whether natural language processing (NLP) techniques can help address the problem of inaccurate citations in a scalable manner.…”