Finally, it seems strange to me that your list of references is longer than the actual excerpt.

The list of references seems to also include the references for the previous (and perhaps also the following?) excerpts.

You also have a lot of references in parentheses, which make the piece frustrating to read - hopefully you'll use little numbers instead.

This will depend entirely on the guidelines of the publication where they'll submit this, but I'll regardless note that I prefer parentheses in the text.