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FAQ: How old should or can a source be for my research?
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Last Updated: Jul 18, 2024 Views: 133929
How old your research sources can be, using the publication date or date of creation as the defining criteria, is either stated in your assignment rubric or depends on your field of study or academic discipline. If it’s a requirement for your assignment, look for words like “sources must be published in the last 10 years” or words to that effect that specify the publication date or range required. If the currency of sources is not a requirement of your assignment, think about the course involved and what an appropriate age might be.
How fast-changing is the field of study?
Sources for a history paper might, by their very nature, be older if they are diaries, personal letters, or other documents created long ago and used as primary sources. Sources used for research in the sciences (health care, nursing, engineering), business and finance, and education and other social science fields require more “cutting edge” research, as these fields change quickly with the acquisition of new knowledge and the need to share it rapidly with practitioners in those fields.
A good rule of thumb is to use sources published in the past 10 years for research in the arts, humanities, literature, history, etc.
For faster-paced fields, sources published in the past 2-3 years is a good benchmark since these sources are more current and reflect the newest discoveries, theories, processes, or best practices.
Use the library’s Multi-Search search results page to limit your sources to those published within a date range you specify. Use the Publication Date custom setting seen on the left side of the search results page:
For further assistance with this or other search techniques, contact the Shapiro Library email at [email protected] or use our 24/7 chat service.
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How Old Should Your Article References Be? Based on 3,823,919 Examples
I analyzed 3,823,919 references cited in 96,685 research papers, chosen at random from those uploaded to PubMed Central between the years 2016 and 2021, in order to answer the question:
How to determine if a reference is too old to be included in a research article?
I used the BioC API to download the data (see the References section below).
Here’s a summary of the key findings
1- When searching for references to cite, you should aim to find those published within the past 13 years . However, 25% of references cited in published research papers are older than this, and there is no convincing evidence that higher-quality articles cite more recent sources.
2- Looking at the same data from the author’s point of view , we can say that: You should not expect your paper to get cited a lot within its first year of publication, the estimated peak will be after 3 to 13 years , then it will gradually taper off, but your paper can still get cited even 27 years after publication!
How old is the average cited source?
Looking at the density plot below we see that:
A large portion of references cited in research papers is less than 5-years-old, and the majority is less than 10-years-old.
Note that the reference age is calculated by subtracting the publication year of the reference from that of the paper citing it.
The table below shows that:
The median reference cited in a research paper is 7-years-old, and 75% of references were published within the past 13-years. Still, 5% of papers cited sources older than 27 years, some even used historical sources.
Do higher-quality articles cite more recent sources?
In order to answer this question, the quality of a given article will be judged by the impact factor of the journal in which it was published. Although impact factors are not perfect measures of quality, it could be argued that they provide a good proxy for our purposes.
So I collected the journal impact factor (JIF) for 71,579 articles and divided the dataset into 2 groups:
- research papers published in low impact journals (JIF ≤ 3): this subset consisted of 34,758 articles and 1,247,373 references
- research papers published in high impact journals (JIF > 3): this subset consisted of 36,821 articles and 1,791,061 references
The median reference in both groups was 7-years-old, the mean however was different: the average reference in the first group was 10.1-years-old and in the second group was 9.3-years-old. So there isn’t enough evidence to conclude that higher quality articles reference more recent sources.
- Comeau DC, Wei CH, Islamaj Doğan R, and Lu Z. PMC text mining subset in BioC: about 3 million full text articles and growing, Bioinformatics , btz070, 2019.
Further reading
- How Long Should a Research Paper Be? Data from 61,519 Examples
- How Many References to Cite? Based on 96,685 Research Papers
- Statistical Software Popularity in 40,582 Research Papers
- Programming Languages Popularity in 12,086 Research Papers
- Length of a Conclusion Section: Analysis of 47,810 Examples
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VIDEO
COMMENTS
We often receive questions about whether sources must have been published within a certain time frame to be cited in a scholarly paper. Many writers incorrectly believe in the “outdated sources” myth, which is that sources must have been published recently, such as the last 5 to 10 years.
A good rule of thumb is to use sources published in the past 10 years for research in the arts, humanities, literature, history, etc. For faster-paced fields, sources published in the past 2-3 years is a good benchmark since these sources are more current and reflect the newest discoveries, theories, processes, or best practices.
When in doubt, you can cite one old and one new paper. However, your work must be in the context of contemporary scientific literature. If you cite a 50 year old paper for a theory, you better make sure the theory has not been disproven in another paper published 30 years after.
Some information becomes dated when new research is available, but other older sources of information can still be useful and reliable fifty or a hundred years later. For example, if you are researching a scientific topic, you will want to be sure you have the most up-to-date information.
Each source should be evaluated on its own merits. Older sources should be checked against newer scholarship (if available). This process of verifying your sources may ultimately lead you to new research to incorporate into your paper.
The median reference cited in a research paper is 7-years-old, and 75% of references were published within the past 13-years. Still, 5% of papers cited sources older than 27 years, some even used historical sources.