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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.

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.

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 paper, 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.

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.

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.

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.