Open AccessLiterary runaway: Increasingly more references cited per academic research article from 1980 to 2019
Author(s) -
Chaoyang Dai,
Quan Chen,
Tao Wan,
Fan Liu,
YaJun Gong,
Qingfeng Wang
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0255849
Subject(s) - discipline , focus (optics) , academic writing , the internet , library science , sociology , history , social science , computer science , world wide web , physics , optics , pedagogy
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.