Surprisingly, I have not found a similar question to mine - all I found was a question about the maximum number of citations per sentence.
However, I am more interested in the total number of citations that is considered normal for a paper (to be more specific, a Master Thesis, which in my case will be around 60 pages of content.)
I heard that about 1 - 1.5 multiplied with page count would be a good number of sources cited.
I am asking because I am a little worried that I might have cited too many sources.
Answer
There is no definite answer. It really depends on how much previous literature exists, how much of it you have reviewed and cited appropriately, and (loosely) what the word count of the document is. Page count can misleading, as some theses have many more figures and tables than others.
No one is going to skip to the bibliography, think negative thoughts, and say "you have too many references!" without reading the document. If no individual part of the thesis could be considered as having too many citations, then the thesis as a whole has an appropriate number of citations.
These related questions have answers as to how you can decide if a particular part of the thesis has too many citations.
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