Is ten references enough for a resident literature review?

To give you a straight answer, ten references is almost certainly too light for a thorough resident literature review, especially if you have an eye toward publication. While your supervisor mentioned keeping it concise, medical literature reviews usually need a bit more heft to show you have truly scanned the horizon. Since you have already gathered fifteen papers, you are actually in a great spot, but you will likely want to aim for closer to twenty to thirty sources to fully cover your bases without overloading the reader. I completely understand the stress of trying to strike that perfect balance, especially with a three-week deadline looming during a busy internal medicine rotation. It feels like trying to pack a suitcase for a long trip where you want to bring everything just in case, but you also do not want to pay the heavy bag fee. If you write a review on a topic like management strategies for a specific type of heart failure, ten papers would only let you scratch the surface of the clinical trials, guidelines, and conflicting viewpoints. Having a few more sources allows you to compare different studies side-by-side, which is exactly what makes a review valuable and publishable. Do not worry about overloading the manuscript just yet. Focus on grouping your current fifteen papers by their main themes, and you will quickly see where the gaps are. You can easily sprinkle in a few more seminal trials or recent guidelines to round out the narrative. You have plenty of time to polish this, so take a deep breath, trust the work you have already done, and keep building a strong foundation for your review.