You need to cite sources any time and every time that you use someone else’s words or ideas to answer a question, write a paper or presentation, post in a discussion board, or anything else.

According to the APA 7th edition, on page 254, “it is considered overcitation to repeat the same citation in every sentence when the source and topic have not changed.” So generally, as long as the reader can tell which source you are drawing on or responding to, you don’t need to keep adding citations.

In paragraphs that contain one overall instance of paraphrased information, “cite the source in the first sentence in which it is relevant and do not repeat the citation in subsequent sentences as long as the source remains clear and unchanged” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 254).

Instead, when paraphrasing a key point in more than one sentence within a paragraph, cite the source in the first sentence in which it is relevant and do not repeat the citation in subsequent sentences as long as the source remains clear and unchanged.

How many references is too many references? Of course, it is possible to use too many references. If you are using references just to show off all the books you’ve read, this will be obvious and will not impress your markers. Remember, markers also want to see evidence of your own, original thinking.

The most-cited paper in history is a paper by Oliver Lowry describing an assay to measure the concentration of proteins. By 2014 it had accumulated more than 305,000 citations.

In any level research paper, you should cite as often (equivalently, as little) as necessary in order to inform the reader of relevant prior work. If seven papers are relevant to what you are saying in a given sentence, you should cite those seven papers.

Highly cited papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year. Researchers who, within an ESI-defined field, publish highly cited papers are judged to be influential, so the production of multiple top 1% papers is interpreted as a mark of exceptional impact.

With 10 or more citations, your work is now in the top 24% of the most cited work worldwide; this increased to the top 1.8% as you reach 100 or more citations. Main take home message: the average citation per manuscript is clearly below 10!

Find the Most Highly Cited Papers for a Journal On the results page, change the “Sort by” box (upper right of the list) to “Times Cited-Highest to Lowest”; the articles that then appear at the top of the list are the journal’s most cited.

An author’s highly influential citation count is simply the sum of the highly influential citations of his or her papers. This metric and its implementation exemplify the potential of AI to overcome information overload in the research literature.

From 1972 to 1992, Professor Chomsky was cited 7,449 times in the Social Science Citation Index-likely the greatest number of times for a living person there as well, although the research into those numbers isn’t complete. In addition, from 1974 to 1992 he was cited 1,619 times in the Science Citation Index.

Studies suggest 5 ways to increase citation counts

1. Watch your title length and punctuation.
2. Take advantage of preprint servers and release your results early.
3. Avoid mentioning a country in your title, abstract or keywords.
4. Link your paper to the supporting data in a freely accessible repository.
5. Cut the hyphens.

In 1979, Eugene Garfield noted: “Theoretically, self-citations are a way of manipulating citation rates…. [but] it is quite difficult to use self-citation to inflate a citation count without being rather obvious about it. Any person attempting to do this would have to publish very frequently to make any difference.

The process whereby the impact or “quality” of an article is assessed by counting the number of times other authors mention it in their work. Citation analysis invovles counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publicaton or author.