I recently recalled an experience I had when submitting for a research grant proposal. And this is what motivates me to write on this subject.
In this proposal which I submitted, there is this reviewer who gave rather nasty comments without solid suggestion on what to be improved. And in there he mentioned about one sentence which to him contained too many references.
So what I did? I gave example of a research article where there is a sentence with lots of references in a single line. I guess or hope that did the job in answering to the comment.
And I thought it would be nice to just mention about this and find out how many references can one cite in a single line? Perhaps I can reuse it in the future.
I randomly pick some articles in my archive and found some of the following.
The first is an article by Delaroche et al., Nuclear Physics A 771 (2006). In the fifth line of the introduction section, it was written
These include high spin isomerism which is known to delay fission [12,13] and may enhance stability as well as impact the decay path of superheavy nuclei [14], triaxiality [15], shape coexistences and superdeformations [16–18], ground state deformations [19–21], and fission [8,22–27].
Lets count how many references there are in that one single line — a total of 17 references!
A second article by Warda and Egido, Physical Review C 86 (2012) has in the first line of the second paragraph of the introduction section,
In the last decades huge progress in the synthesis of new elements has been achieved in world-leading laboratories such as the GSI, Darmstadt [1–8], the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Dubna [9–14], and Rikagaku Kenkyusho (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Japan; RIKEN), Tokyo [15–18].
with a total of 18 references! In the same article, there is also a sentence with 11 references which goes
The fission barriers and the ground-state properties were calculated using macroscopic-microscopic methods over a large range of deformation parameters and nuclear shapes, including reflection- and axial-symmetry breaking [29–40].
So this just goes to show that there are no limitations to the number of references that one can cite. However, one must make sure that the references are indeed relevant to what the sentence is trying to convey.
