A good academic paper should be well-referenced, with information taken from a variety of sources. Usually, we will refer to sources three or four times or more in each paragraph of the main body, and probably several times in the introduction, too. Some of those references will be to Jane Eyre, but others will be to academic papers and books about Jane Eyre or related topics.
So there may be something between about ten and twenty references to research sources apart from Jane Eyre in a 1000-word research paper. We probably don't refer to the same source more than two or three times, so that suggests that we might have about five to ten different reference sources.
The quality of the references is also important. We should avoid reference sources written for the general public, or for children or for learners of English, or even for students. They are all OK for background information, and to help us get started on our research, but we want our paper to look like a "real" research paper, so we should limit ourselves to reference sources written by academics for academics.
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