I'm doing a thesis on the generic organisation of the conclusion section of research articles. I already had the authors' consent to use their conclusion sections as part of my data set and extracted some examples to illustrate my findings.
I'm wondering if I have to put all the sources of my data set in the reference list or just the ones I extracted, or is there no need to do so?
Caveat: I am not very familiar with studies of academic publications on a textual level, however, I am somewhat familiar with bibliometric studies and similar.
I do not consider citing those publications to be appropriate. There is a clear distinction between using an academic paper as data and using its results (e.g., in a review paper). The probably easiest way to see this is by slightly modifying your scenario:
Suppose that you were studying novel blurbs instead of academic conclusions. Would you cite the novels? If this isn’t already clear enough, consider a study of graffiti or school essays.
Suppose you were studying citation graphs (and compile your data yourself). In that case, your data can easily originate from thousands of papers. Would you cite all those papers?
By contrast, I do not see a continuous path from your scenario to one where it is clear that you should cite.
Of course, it should still be clear where your data comes from and citation tools might be a convenient way to document this.
For this I wouldn't put them in as references, I would have them as part of the data. So wherever you have the data you have extracted (probably a supplemental), have a column for source.
