It seems like I am in a phase of writing about time-related things right now. I recently was criticized for using some works in the review of literature part of a paper because of the age of the works (what I considered 'seminal' someone else considered 'dated'). I have also noticed increasingly that it is difficult to access older articles directly via the online library resources I have access to (from two universities). Anything written before the late 90s tends to require an interlibrary loan request. I also know other students who deliberately limit their searches to the last 20 or even last 10 years - why? Because someone told them to only look at things after 1990 or 2000. Below is a picture of the "Hot Tub time machine," by the way. What this reminds me of is the time period in which compact discs emerged as the technology of choice for music. From about the middle 80s forward, everything new came out on CD (there was an interesting 'gap' period when new releases came out on vinyl, cassette and CD). Many of the 'classics' were re-released on CD as were older releases by currently popular bands, but for a time period, as vinyl records started to disappear, there were some of the less mainstream recordings that were very difficult to find. Rhino records did an admirable job of capturing a lot of this - especially helping preserve a lot of 60s-70s pop-rock music.
I fear the same fate may befall older research articles - without a Rhino-esque publisher to save them. Sure, they are not all great and there are way too many of them. But I have already heard or read more than one instance of a person claiming to have developed or discovered something 'new' - that is not new at all; it just happened to be written up sometime in the late 80s to early 90s and they did not search that far back. No one person is ever (easily) going to be able to search everything in some fields, but the harder things are to find, the less likely it is that the knowledge will be there, even spread among several individuals. I appreciate that in some fields the research is obsolete. Certainly this is the case with technology (a point I made recently in a book review). On the other hand, how we interact with or respond to technology may in some ways not be all that different. I would go so far as to say that a lot of human behavior research done in the 80s (or, gasp! even earlier) still holds true today. But once we decide something is no longer valid because it is 'old,' we risk losing a lot and are, as someone said 'doomed to repeat history's mistakes.'
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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