Georgia Howat and David Hepworth joining you this month on the Mastery in Writing series. We were having a conversation about what constitutes an ‘up-to-date’ source/citation. It's a question students often ask, and the answer varies, context dependent on who, what and why you are referencing. You'll be familiar with 5–10 years as the suggestion for current evidence, which sounds reasonable in terms of currency – but isn't always when it comes to your academic writing. Let's think context.
Example: You're tasked with exploring the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, how it works, and its proposed (and discredited) link with autism. You do a literature search and find plenty of resources going back over 20 years. Which might you use? Let's start with immunology – how the vaccine works. For this, you want the most recent edition of a decent immunology text.
Then you'll move to known side effects – you'll want an ‘up-to-date’ source to support these. Your immunology text would probably suffice, but consider bringing additional sources to demonstrate your reading around the topic. Side effects do change as population and population health changes, and advancements in medicine, changes in medication use and reactivity may all impact down-stream. You might find that the key material still falls outside the 5-to 10-year window. As the vaccine was developed a long time ago, with many subsequent trials carried out at that time, there may not be material produced recently. Research is expensive and time consuming, and if trials/reviews consistently demonstrated 20 years ago that there were no major side effects, and there have been no medically significant changes since, there is little point carrying out more research to reaffirm this. You might therefore frame your discussion around a couple of high-quality studies from that period. If you can think of a justifiable reason to re-undertake a study from what you are reading, but you can't find a further study, use this as a discussion point in your work!
Supporting your academic writing, you'll want to bring in criticality. For the MMR controversy, you might well mention the drop-in vaccination rates in the years following the flawed Wakefield et al (1998) study. However, you would also need something bang up-to-date – a quick search for the 2024 UK Government stats on measles infections, for example.
Let's consider the converse, and the safety-net that is using resources from the last 5 years. Within this blanket rule, anything from 2020 to now is perfectly acceptable to refer to, is it not? Being tasked with a discussion relating to the impact of COVID-19 in a similar way to that above, you would not be starting with an article from 2020 (there were many), which discussed the mechanisms of infection and harm caused. You may consider using this – now old – research to compare to recent developments, but your writing must make clear that there is change and what that change is. What are you signing your name against knowing? Remember: all your writing is demonstrating your knowledge of a topic.
Conceptually, when writing about any topic, you should consider time subjectively, with thoughts on change and development impacting your outcomes. A trap that a lot of students fall into is citing an article that could broadly be considered ‘current’. Don't be then tempted to look at its reference list for sources as you will soon find you are using articles that are significantly out of date (assuming the author adopted the same ‘current’ evidence philosophy).
Think about your topic, the context, and be prepared to do the leg work in terms of plenty of searching for evidence (practice is essential, and your library will have lots of resources to help you on your journey in this regard). You'll produce a much better piece of work and learn more in the process.