Yes, the point is to see something like your birthyear or maybe that good summer in your 20s being described as too old to be relevant anymore stings
Comment on The 1900s
Lojcs@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Isn’t this an actual thing? Pretty sure I was told by some instructor not to use references older than a decade or two old. Unless the subject is very elementary older sources are more likely to be obsolete
7bicycles@hexbear.net 2 months ago
IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 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.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Depends on the subject. Historians use a lot older materials more regularly for obvious reasons.
Lojcs@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Ofc
nickhammes@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Well said. :)