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I've had a teacher tell me that I needed to have 3 citations per paragraph in my paper. The paper is to be 20 pages long. Is this level of citation (over 200 individual in-text citations in the paper) too much for undergraduate work? The way that she phrased it left uncertainty whether this was for every paragraph, or only for the quoted ones, so the context of whether similar works have this level of quotation in them is the only standard I have to go by.

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    What field is this? What type of paper? Does she mean 200 unique references or 200 citations? Please add more detail.
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 17:42
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    Why are you asking us rather than the instructor? You are not even clear on what the instructor is actually requiring. Obviously 3 citations for every single paragraph in a 20 page paper seems high, but without the context, we can't say more than that (and our opinions don't matter in any case).
    – cag51 ♦
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 18:04
  • by default, do what instructor say, show them example of your work, then adjust
    – aaaaa says reinstate Monica
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 1:33
  • How many words is "20 pages"? FWIW I made just over 200 citations in a 14K word thesis.
    – curiousdannii
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 8:28
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    @curiousdannii a fair comparison is probably the number of citations in your literature review/introduction since that is closer to a term paper format.
    – StrongBad
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 13:08

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If you are asking whether it is a general "best practice" for a research paper at any level to have three citations per paragraph: no, it is not. 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. If in a paragraph you are not saying anything that makes reference to or would be aided by making reference to prior literature, then there should be no citations in the paragraph. You never insert citations to meet numerical requirements.

However, this is an assignment for a course, so the best practice is whatever your instructor told you.

The way that she phrased it left uncertainty whether this was for every paragraph, or only for the quoted ones, so the context of whether similar works have this level of quotation in them is the only standard I have to go by.

No, you can ask your instructor which of the above is what she wants. I encourage you to do so.

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    This is true for professional-level work, but undergraduate term papers don't generally include contextualization in the literature because they don't generally make new contributions to the field.
    – Elizabeth Henning
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 18:29
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    @ElizabethHenning Even if you don't add anything new, isn't it still good to provide context?
    – JAB
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 21:37
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    @JAB Of course, but advice like "three citations per paragraph" leads me to believe that the OP is a Writing 101 course where the assignment is to do independent reading on a topic and then write it up in an "academic style" with citations back to the source material. This is very different from a survey paper or doing original research and providing citations in a lit review.
    – Elizabeth Henning
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 21:41
  • It was an undergraduate course, but was in fact a literature review. I followed the recommendation about taking the instructor's advice seriously, even though it led to an awkwardly constructed paper. I never planned on publishing (and this wasn't part of the project, anyway) but I conducted a large amount of research to construct the paper using the A and B therefore C type of construction for any claims. This was necessary because the fields of social psychology and sociology both use such thick language to describe anything, that it was hard to construct relationships between papers.
    – N E Techno Tech Blog
    Commented May 16, 2022 at 14:56
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Yes and no. This is highly field dependent. Here are two examples:

  1. Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm. This is an artificial intelligence paper about creating a neural network engine that plays Chess & Shogi better than conventional engines. Notice that it starts by citing a lot of previous articles in the introduction, but by the time it goes into detail about how AlphaZero is created and trained, there are much fewer citations. This is natural: after all, the authors are doing something that hasn't been done before, so one cannot expect there to be references.

  2. Princes’ Wars, Wars of the People, or Total War? Mass Armies and the Question of a Military Revolution in Germany, 1792–1815. Here we have a history paper about Germany during the Napoleonic wars. Now we see citations everywhere. The entire paper is filled with it, almost uniformly. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a paragraph that doesn't have three citations.

Since expectations vary by field, the answer to your question is also going to depend on your field. But there's an easy shortcut: since your lecturer is requesting 3 citations a paragraph, you are probably in a field more akin to history and less to artificial intelligence. In that case, three citations per paragraph is not excessive, and you should conform to the field's standards.

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    Nice examples! (I don't have access the the second paper, but what you said about it definitely seems reasonable to me.)
    – Dave L Renfro
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 7:54
  • @DaveLRenfro good point, switching to an OA article.
    – Allure
    Commented Apr 11, 2019 at 2:48
  • I found that three citations per paragraph was excessive in the fields cited (social psychology & sociology & business psychology), given that the papers that I was citing often only had one to two citations per paragraph. I worked my way through it regardless, and it ended up being a very awkward paper given the guidelines. I'm not sure that she had thought through the guidelines well, honestly, and found no evidence in the papers of other students that they had been asked to perform the same work. I must have done something to irritate her, or something in my paper rubbed her the wrong way.
    – N E Techno Tech Blog
    Commented May 16, 2022 at 15:04
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Trying to get the people here between you and your instructor will annoy her even more. Whether it is excessive or not, it is her requirements that matter.

But I'll just guess that she wants to push you a bit to give you good habits of backing up everything you say in your paper using the available literature. She probably also wants you to do a lot of literature searching.

Treat it as something like a "wind-sprint" ordered by a football coach to give you endurance and prepare you for the big game. As Nike said: Just. Do. It.

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  • I don't plan on using anything here against anyone. I just want to get a basic feel for what's generally expected. Her style of communication isn't the clearest, and I'm expecting that this is one of her many sins of omission.
    – N E Techno Tech Blog
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 17:18
  • As much as I agree with this answer and respect your intent, I think you need to balance following a specific instructor's rule of thumb with truly understanding what a citation is and when you should use it. Forcing yourself to generate three improper or artificial citations per paragraph is different than writing paragraphs that inherently have three legitimate citations each.
    – dwizum
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 13:18
  • Consider an analogy: if you're a building contractor putting up houses in a development, and the developer tells you "every house must have three staircases!" you should probably make sure you're not slapping three staircases to nowhere in a bunch of one-story houses.
    – dwizum
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 13:21
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    Actually, @dwizum, wouldn't a wise contractor try to figure out the real intent and satisfy it intelligently? Should a wise student do less? I hope the OP doesn't conclude that artificial citations are "going for the win". (Actually, at one point in my early educations I was a "smart ass" student myself though. Parent-teacher conference resulted, of course.)
    – Buffy
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 13:31
  • Yes agreed - I guess my point was, if the instructor is requiring three per paragraph, then yes - do three - but also, make sure you're understanding what a citation is for, and using them appropriately. I think in the end we're saying the same thing.
    – dwizum
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 15:56
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First of all, the number of citations needed doesn't have anything to do with whether it's undergraduate work or a professional article. My guess from what little you've said is that she gave you a rule of thumb that you're taking too literally.

Citations are used to support a statement you make with an authoritative source, since presumably you aren't an authority. Three citations per paragraph would mean that you are synthesizing a variety of sources and not relying on any one source for long chunks of text, which could border on plagiarism. As long as you are making good use of multiple sources and citing them properly, I doubt that she is going to count the exact number of citations per paragraph.

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    Hmmm. On the other hand, reasonable as it sounds, you won't be the one with the marking pen.
    – Buffy
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 18:21
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I am sure this is somewhat field dependent, but 3 citations per paragraph seems like perfectly reasonable advice to give. In terms of general advice, paragraphs have 5 sentences (yes sometimes they have more and sometimes they have less, but we are talking in generalities). The first sentence is a topic sentence and the last is a concluding sentence. These should be (to continue with the sweeping generalities) original ideas that do not require citations. The other 3 sentences are you supporting arguments and should each have a reference (possibly to multiple works).

When you extrapolate this out to a 20 page paper, there might be 40 5-sentence paragraphs. The first paragraph and the last paragraph may not have citations also (as again they are the original ideas). Finally, some works would be cited in multiple places. That might put the total number of unique references in a 20 page paper at around 80-100. I don't think I have ever seen an undergraduate paper get to that number, but I also write citation needed an awful lot.

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  • This is actually pretty close to the unique references I used at about 75. What I ended up doing is formulating complex statements using parts of the original authors dialog (A and B thus C format), rephrasing them to make them more consistent (paraphrase) and quoting wherever it matched. It ended up being an impressively complex paper because of this. There was still about 180 internal citations that referred to 75 original works in the works cited. Making a ten minute presentation out of this paper was daunting.
    – N E Techno Tech Blog
    Commented Feb 27, 2020 at 17:03

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