When biomedical scientists refer to ‘recent’ research in their publications, they can interpret that concept quite broadly. The citation in question may have appeared 0 to 37 years ago. On average, ‘recent’ means 5.53 years old. Alejandro Díez-Vidal and Jose R. Arribas write this from the Hospital La Paz Institute for Health Research in Madrid in the traditionally light-hearted Christmas issue of The British Medical Journal.
Last summer, Díez-Vidal and Arribas analyzed, ‘for fun’, a thousand publications for the use of the adjective ‘recent’ and looked in the bibliography to see which publication this referred to. To keep things manageable, they only included the first occurrence of the word in their analysis in these articles.
One in five references to ‘recent’ referred to literature published ten or more years ago. There is great variation within the different disciplines. The authors are pleased to note that their own field (infectious diseases) is among those with the shortest citation interval. It is not surprising that the field of ’emergency care’ has the least delay here in referring to recent publications. Outliers on the other side of the spectrum are nephrology, veterinary medicine and dentistry. With references with a median of 8.5 to 14 years after publication, they have “a much broader temporal interpretation.”
What was also striking in the analysis was that publications in journals with a high impact factor generally had a noticeably shorter interval for ‘recent’. Surprisingly, mentioning the word ‘recent’ in the title of the scientific article did not determine how up-to-date the use of ‘recent’ was in the article itself. Older articles were looser in their use of ‘recent’. For the year 2000, the median was 6 to 8 years, but between 2020 and 2025 the median was 2.5 years.
“Our research confirms what many readers have long suspected, but so far no one has dared to quantify it,” the Spaniards write. The term “recent” is more often a flexible rhetorical device than a reliable indicator of actual fresh insight, they conclude. It is a convenience word that ranks at the top of the list of other vague language in scientific literature, such as ’emerging evidence’, ‘a growing body of evidence’ and ‘some studies suggested’.
Díez-Vidal and Arribas write that they excluded articles in languages other than English from their sample. They realize, they write, that they have missed out on potentially valuable research material, especially in the Spanish language area. As born and bred Spanish speakers, both authors are well aware of how vague the term is ‘reciente’ can be in their own language.
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