• mommykink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I understand the idea that someone referring to 1994 as “the late 1900s,” is pretty funny, but in my experience as an undergrad, most professors would ask you to use a more recent article if the citation was anything more than an anecdote

    • Eggymatrix
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      1 year ago

      Depends from the field really, a math paper from the 70s would be considered fairly recent in some cases.

      • Player2@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        In my school they’re still doing environmental classes with a textbook from last century…

        • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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          1 year ago

          I took a quantum physics class that used a textbook from the 70s, and it only covered ideas discovered around the 20s. Most courses only need really old knowledge

          • Player2@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Yeah but it was speculating how carbon in the air might be a bad thing and how electric vehicles might some day be feasibly commonplace. Little bit out of date

      • Kogasa@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        An undergrad math degree stops right around the start of the 20th century. Grad school might get you to the 80s in specific areas.

  • bazzett@mujico.org
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    1 year ago

    As others said, it depends on the research field. I’m a biologist, and when I was a student, we needed to write a report about a certain worm of the phylum Nematomorpha that we found when doing field research. Turns out that the “most recent” references for Mexico about that group were from the 1930s! So I wrote to an expert from the University of Arizona (I think) and he confirmed my findings: there are almost no research about those worms in my country. So we completed our report with those old references and our teacher said it was good. In fact, in evolutive biology, systematics and taxonomy is not so rare to cite papers even from the 19th century, but surely we are an exception 🤷🏻‍♂️.