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How do I claim the number of scholarly articles on a niche subject is relatively small without listing every single one of those citations?

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I have a sentence in my literature review that goes something like this:

... has only been thoroughly evaluated by a relatively small number of experts in the xx literature (author1992; author1994; author1998; author2001; author2009; etc etc etc etc).

How do I go about NOT listing every single resource/reference/citation. What can I write that accomplishes the point of listing just a subset of the references from the "small" total.

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Consider something like the following:

... has only been thoroughly evaluated by a small number of experts in the xx literature, the most significant of which are (author1992, author1994, ...).

By casting it this way you're not implying that you're listing all of them but you're also not just picking some at random. You are saying to your reader: "these are the best of what's out there", with an implied "and that's not enough, which is why I'm writing this article".

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