[alialkhatib]

That's an interesting idea. For what it's worth, I would cite the publication which prompted the idea behind my approach, so I don't think this is the answer to your question.

That being said, I think you're onto something. I was recently involved in a project leading to a paper for a conference, and while I don't know whether it'll get accepted (meaning I don't know if it's even representative of the kinds of papers conferences want to see), I notice in hindsight that we had only a few citations that really informed a totally novel methodological approach we used. By contrast, we cited a ton of research in the domain area we studied.

So my takeaway is that it's hard to bring in dozens of papers to inform one's methods necessarily because methods (like a protocol) require one somewhat coherent narrative. Integrating the collective body of knowledge about a topic (like, oh let's say.. online labor markets) is a lot easier, making "rapid-fire" citations in that context more likely.

I'd like to see a seasoned researcher (or at least someone with the experience of a few publications) weigh in on this though.