I was reviewing something yesterday that had a sentence of the form “Recent work, however, indicates that… (Smith 1997).” About which my first thought was, “That’s not recent.” And my second thought was, “Well, this paper is in a slow-moving specialty area, so maybe that does count as recent.” I wonder if somebody handy with text scraping could take instances of “recent work”, “recent study”, “recent paper”, etc., and the accompanying citation date and use it as a measure of how quickly different areas or fields develop.
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6 Comments
I’ll bet the publication dates associated with “recent” correlate negatively with the age of the writer, and that this is a stronger predictor than anything else. 1997 seems pretty recent to me. If it also correlates with the specialty area, I predict that will be an artifact of the age of the area and, thus, of the people in the area.
Ooh, good point. So now we have competing predictions. Someone, go do the study and let us know.
Maybe the piece has been under review since 2003.
I thought that this post would include pictures of cute kittens in need of a home. I’m not sure that this paper idea is as much fun as a cute kitten.
I’m with Sarah S.- I think the results would tell us more about average review times than rates of progress in a sub-area. Although, come to think of it, those aren’t really separate questions.
I thought of this post yesterday, and OW’s comment, when I got an email from a student at a different university who cited my work and wanted to share their paper with me. I nearly choked on my water when I got to the line that called my research – from 2006 – “dated,” pointing to my now 10 year old data.
I understand that some subfields and social phenomena move quickly, but I don’t consider the findings all that time-sensitive. It was amazing to me to think that what I find so recent (the beginning of my career, when I don’t even have tenure yet) is considered too old by someone else to be taken all that seriously.