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

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....

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Can Dai, Quan Chen, Tao Wan, Fan Liu, Yanbing Gong, Qingfeng Wang
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/abae945a4da44a74b3a9e3eeba61ecfe
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario: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.