It is said that the quality of a scientific publication is as good as the science it cites, but the properties of high-quality reference lists have never been numerically quantified. We examined seven numerical characteristics of reference lists of 50,878 primary research articles published in 17 ecological journals between 1997 and 2017. Over this 20-years period, there have been significant changes in reference lists’ properties. On average, more recent ecological papers have longer reference lists, cite more high Impact Factor papers, and fewer non-journal publications. Furthermore, we show that highly cited papers across the ecology literature have longer reference lists, cite more recent and impactful papers, and account for more self-citations. Conversely, the proportion of ‘classic’ papers and non-journal publications cited, as well as the temporal range of the reference list, have no significant influence on articles’ citations. From this analysis, we distill a recipe for crafting impactful reference lists.

中文翻译：

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生态论文中高质量参考文献列表的科学计量相关性

据说科学出版物的质量与它所引用的科学一样好，但是高质量参考文献的性质从未得到过数字量化。我们研究了1997年至2017年间在17种生态学期刊上发表的50,878篇主要研究文章的参考文献列表的七个数值特征。在这20年的时间里，参考文献列表的性质发生了显着变化。平均而言，最近的生态论文的参考文献列表较长，引用的影响因子论文数量更多，非期刊论文的数量更少。此外，我们表明，在生态学文献中被高度引用的论文具有更长的参考文献列表，引用了更新的和有影响力的论文，并解释了更多的自我引文。相反，引用的“经典”论文和非期刊出版物所占的比例，以及参考文献列表的时间范围对文章的引文没有重大影响。通过此分析，我们提炼出了具有影响力的参考清单。