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So I have the following question assuming I start with N academic papers, though I was thinking to make this simple I start with one academic paper. And say it has C citations, and each one of these C citations, has their own D citations. Is there a way I could estimate when there would be a convergence of the number of citations. Basically when I would end up reading citations that I had already read? (So basically D would be one of the N papers)

(The inspiration for this question is because I have to do a literature review in Bioengienering, and I was wondering, what depth I should go to to read relevant papers, that are cited by a relevant paper, that is sufficient to have done an in depth analysis of my sub field)

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    To rephrase this in graph-theory terms, the question is basically "What is the diameter of the directed graph of paper citations?" Unfortunately, we don't know what that graph looks like: you would have to create the graph and calculate the diameter, at which point you might as well just read the citations anyway.2012-12-14
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    When you start seeing the same papers over and over again, that's when you're done.2012-12-14
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    Thanks, forgot this is really a graph theory problem, just thought it was an interesting question to consider nonetheless.2012-12-14

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