How many factors to retain in exploratory factor analysis? A critical overview of factor retention methods.

Determining the number of factors is a decisive, yet very difficult decision a researcher faceswhen conducting an exploratory factor analysis. Over the last decades, numerous so-calledfactor retention criteria have been developed to infer the latent dimensionality fromempirical data. While some tutorials and review papers on EFA exist which giverecommendations on how to determine the number of latent factors, there is nocomprehensive overview that categorizes the existing approaches and integrates the resultsof existing simulation studies evaluating the various methods in different data conditions.With this paper, we want to provide such an overview enabling (applied) researchers tomake an informed decision when choosing a factor retention criterion. Summarizing themost important results from recent simulation studies, we provide guidance when to relyon which method and call for a more thoughtful handling of overly simple heuristics.