Fast-growing scientific publications present challenges to the scientific community. In this paper, we describe their implications to researchers. As references form explicit foundations for researchers to conduct a study, we investigate the evolution in reference patterns based on 60.8 million papers published from 1960 to 2015. The results demonstrate that recent papers contain more references than older ones, especially the well-cited papers compared with other papers. Well-cited papers receive 10 or more citations within 5 years of publication. Their references cover a longer period from classic research to very recent studies. Authors of well-cited papers are also farsighted to discover the reference papers with good potential to receive high citation numbers in near future. We also discover that the number of accumulative publications has a negative impact on next-5-year citation count for most fields except Chemistry, Materials science, Environmental science, Biology, and Engineering. Our findings suggest that researchers are expected to devote more effort to producing impactful research. Based on all these findings, we strongly advise against judging researchers simply based on the number of their publications. On the other hand, authors and reviewers should ensure that published papers contain adequate contributions. The code for our analysis is on GitHub: https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/Research-Explosion.

翻译：快速增长的科研出版物给科学界带来了挑战。本文阐述了这些现象对研究人员的影响。由于参考文献构成研究者开展研究的基础，我们基于1960年至2015年间发表的6080万篇论文，分析了参考文献模式的演变。结果表明，近年发表的论文比早期论文包含更多参考文献，其中高引用论文尤为突出。高引用论文指发表后5年内被引用10次及以上的论文，其参考文献覆盖了从经典研究到前沿成果的更长时间跨度。高引用论文的作者还具备前瞻性，能发现那些近期具有高引用潜力的参考文献。我们还发现，除化学、材料科学、环境科学、生物学和工程学外，多数领域的累积发文量对论文未来5年的被引次数存在负面影响。这些发现表明，研究人员需要投入更多精力产出具有影响力的成果。基于此，我们强烈建议不应仅依据论文数量评价研究者。同时，作者和审稿人应确保已发表论文具有充分贡献。分析代码已开源在GitHub：https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/Research-Explosion。