Is it proper to cite something when using it just as an example?

Question

In academic writing, is it proper to cite something to provide it as an example of something else? For instance, we have lines like this in a number of our papers:

Many research endeavors, including environmental and coastal hazard prediction [1], climate modeling [2], high-energy physics simulations [3,4], and genome mapping [5] generate large data volumes on a yearly basis.

Each citation is merely providing an example of a research project that generates large volumes of data (more often than not, it's not even a paper, just a URL), and content from the cited source is not otherwise used anywhere in the paper.

I suppose I tend to think of citations as references to work whose content contributes to a significant portion of content in the paper. A citation then indicates some kind of "weighty" relation between the paper and the thing being cited. In the example I provided, it seems to me that invoking the "weighty" power of citation simply to say "yes, such a data producing project of this type does in fact exist, in case you were wondering"--and doing so five times--is somewhat excessive and that it might serve better as a footmark.

To me it seems these should either be footnotes or just be left out. In any case, it seems they should not go in the bibliography.

Answer 1

I am not sure about other disciplines, but this is certainly neither uncommon nor in any way frowned upon in my field (Computer Science).

Answer 2

I agree with the other answers. It is better to provide citations to good articles that back up or give examples of your statements. In the example you have shown, the use of the citation is allowing the reader to see for themselves what you mean without you having to provide painstaking details that may detract from the main point of your writing. I, myself, have written some articles that have been very heavy on citations, and were not criticized for it.

Answer 3

This is common practise as has already been established by other answers. In fields where the Harvard style is used it is common to add "e.g." (for example) to the references so that the example would read

Many research endeavors, including environmental and coastal hazard prediction (e.g., Smith et al., 1989), climate modelling (e.g., Doe and Smith, 2007), high-energy physics simulations (e.g., Svensson, 2005; Fischer, 2006), and genome mapping (e.g., Iglesias, 2010) generate large data volumes on a yearly basis.

It is not uncommon to add more than one example although there is no "law" either way.

With the Harvard style it becomes easier to see that these are just examples, one of possibly many alternatives.