I heard from someone saying reciprocal links are dead. That is not completely true unless you are building junk link pages and linking back to other sites as a return of exchange. So stop creating junk link pages and linking back to others, instead link sites from your content pages, the pages which other visitors are visiting on your site. .. You can add a partner section at the bottom of page and put about 5 links ( not more) and then ask your link partner to link you back from similar kind of content and pages, especially from pages where they have PR. Such link exchange where you link partner from your content and PR page and your partner gives link back from content and PR page then it helps a lot. Website owners don't really like partner links on their pages but accepting the fact that the back link from good content page with PR will help, the loss could be minimal or almost nothing to lose here. fruitful discussion is invited on this technique. I have used it and it works.
5 links itself is too much ,According to me no of reciprocal links on a page should not be more than 2!
Theoretically it could be correct but I believe having 5 links doesn't hurt much but if users have lot of pages, I would advice to keep the out bound links limited as per their convenience. The key is using reciprocal efficiently and distributed among all the content and PR pages, those are benefiting to the link partner and ourself both.