The NSERC Discovery Grant Program guidelines state that you can include one page of literature references in your application package (in addition to the five page proposal). Do not refer readers to websites for additional information on your proposal or include hyperlinks in your list of references.

Depending on your field, you can either go with numerical [1] reference annotation or include in-text citations (Author, Year). My personal preference is to draft with (Au, Year) inline and then convert to numerical to save space in the final version. (You can certainly start with numerical references too.) Use what you are most comfortable with, but just make sure that you are consistent and be willing to shift to numerical for space considerations. (You might be surprised by how much space you sacrifice to in-text citations.)

A few things to watch out for:

1. Self-referencing – check the proportion of papers that are attributed to you, your collaborators and former supervisors. If you are near or over 50%, you need to include a more diverse view of the literature.

2. Dropped references – cross check your reference list with the inline citations to ensure that they match.
3. Cluster referencing – Similar to self-referencing, it is valuable to examine your references to see if there is a reliance on any particular research group and ensure that all major players in your area are referenced to degree that is relevant to their impact.
4. Reference errors – while it may seem time consuming to check to ensure that your references do not include errors, fact checking your reference citations as you insert them into your reference management software will save you many headaches throughout your research career.

This checklist for reference housecleaning can not only be used for grant applications, but for journal submissions as well.