Is ten sources enough for my master's literature review?

To put it simply, ten sources will almost certainly not be enough for a fifteen-page master's thesis literature review in psychology. While there is no magic number, a comprehensive review at the graduate level typically requires around two to three sources per page, meaning you should aim for closer to thirty to forty sources. Since a literature review synthesizes the existing landscape of a research topic rather than just summarizing individual papers, relying on only ten sources would make your analysis look thin and suggest you haven't fully grasped the breadth of the scholarly conversation. Imagine you are writing your thesis on how mindfulness apps affect college student anxiety. If you only use ten sources, you might cover a couple of foundational studies and a few recent trials, but you will miss the critical nuances. You wouldn't have enough perspectives to contrast different methodologies, explore conflicting findings, or justify why your specific research question is a necessary next step. Your advisor would likely point out that your fifteen pages feel repetitive or padded because you are stretching too few ideas over too much space. Fortunately, you do not have to read every single page of forty different articles to make this happen in two weeks. You can start by strategically reading the abstracts, introductions, and discussion sections of new papers to see if they fit your narrative. Try grouping your findings by theme rather than summarizing one paper after another, which naturally allows you to cite multiple studies at once to support a single point. You should also look at the reference lists of your strongest current papers to quickly find other highly relevant articles. This targeted approach will help you efficiently build a robust bibliography, meet your page count with high-quality synthesis, and submit a strong draft on time.