School of Resources and Environmental Science, Hubei University, Wuhan, China.
Hubei Key Laboratory of Regional Development and Environmental Response, Hubei University, Wuhan, China.
PLoS One. 2021 Aug 6;16(8):e0255849. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255849. eCollection 2021.
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.
参考文献在大多数学术研究论文中被用来表示对他人研究成果的认可和反映学术水平。近几十年来，学术出版物的数量不断增加，我们想知道在这段时间里，不同学科的研究论文中引用的参考文献数量是如何变化的。我们的研究结果表明，在 Web of Science 索引的 1980 年至 2019 年间的 8 个学科类别中，参考文献的密度呈显著线性增长。看来参考文献的饱和还远未到来。总的来说，出版物数量的普遍增加以及互联网和数字化文档的高级可访问性可能促进了某些领域参考文献的增长。然而，这种看似失控的趋势应该得到充分的重视和客观的评估。我们建议作者在写作过程中关注自己的研究本身，而不是政治因素，尤其是选择重要的参考文献进行引用。
