• fossilesque@mander.xyzOPM
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    1 month ago

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

    • nfh@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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.