đź‘ŤÂ Rule of Thumb: On average, in my publication-ready work, I cite between 40-60 papers.
👍 I probably read an additional 10-20 papers that I don’t end up citing in the final draft
These are rules of thumb—the structure of your paper will dictate how many papers you need to cite, but it can sometimes be helpful to have a broad idea in mind when beginning your literature review.
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Students ignore this advice all the time, because Google Scholar makes it somewhat hard to search by journal. Please do not ignore this advice.
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Here are the stats from the papers I’ve written
| Citations | % Top Journals | % Decent Journals | %Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average | 59 | 48% | 15% | 37% |
| Minimum | 29 | 24% | 1% | 3% |
| Maximum | 100 | 68% | 31% | 45% |
Where other includes newspapers, trade publications, books, and papers from other journals.
Read everything even loosely associated with your topic in the A+ marketing journals
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You need to read the top journals because everyone knows these papers. Missing them can make you seem like you don’t know the field well enough and you’re missing something obvious.
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Read anything moderately associated with your topic in the A journals or the Top Journals of other fields
Read anything in the following journals that seems strongly related to your topic
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“Decent” journals tend to publish lower quality work. This work can be of lower quality for one of two reasons: (1) The work’s scope is limited such that it doesn’t make a big theoretical contribution to the field, or (2) The author’s experimental (or qualitative) evidence is not adequately strong to support the claims they want to make in the paper.
Scope problems are not an issue if the paper is strongly related to your topic. Feel free to cite them. Experimental evidence issues are unforgivable. Don’t cite papers with weak experimental evidence
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