Should I add a bibliography for this?

While writing up my introduction for my transfer report (first year exam of the PhD in the UK) I want to give importance to the topic saying something like:

It lead to huge research, being N amount of papers published between 2005-2015 in high-end publications.

I will look at this in Nature database. Should I add a bibliography to this? In the affirmative case, what format should the bibliography item have? In the negative case, I shouldn't add a bibliography, but is it OK to put an statement like this one in a report/thesis?

I am using bibtex but just the output format will do.