this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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The 1900s (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Isn't this an actual thing? Pretty sure I was told by some instructor not to use references older than a decade or two. Unless the subject is very elementary older sources are more likely to be obsolete

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Depends on the subject. Historians use a lot older materials more regularly for obvious reasons.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And even then it's probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.

If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Well said. :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

In chemistry a lot of the foundational synthesis and work is as old as the 60s and 70s; people build on it, but in some cases those early papers said pretty much all there is to be said on a topic, so there's no reason to republish on it.

I've had to cite papers as old as the late 30s before, because no one has ever found anything to fix or correct about their work! Pretty impressive if you ask me, given how few tools they had.