When one is working in a dynamic research field or domain, newer versions of published frameworks, templates, and tools need to be published on a regular basis. While newer versions - with substantial changes - may or may not be re-published in an academic peer-reviewed format, they still need to be acknowledged.
It is increasingly wasteful to contact authors who have referenced an article I've written in year X to point them to a more updated article in years X+1 or X+8. Similar to many other fellow researchers, I invest much effort in publishing the most updated research findings and new/amended concepts in public presentations and blog posts. But sadly, many researchers - who choose to reference the works - still opt for one of the older versions rather than the latest one clearly and easily available to them.
I suspect this is a prevalent problem but the question is still worth asking: is there a way to address this issue in a meaningful way? Other than stamping older publications with a hyperlink to a continuously updated online resource, what are the techniques that can be followed to encourage researchers to to seek the newest versions, or to discourage those who intentionally reference an outdated version of a concept or set of findings?
Today, with Google Scholar giving the citations for a selected paper with the click on a link, it is inexcusable for a researcher not to follow the recent citation chain. However, to ensure reliability, Scholar does not scan presentations and blogs. These documents have not been subject to peer review scrutiny, and are therefore of dubious repute. Referees and supervisors rightly disparage researchers and candidates from using them. So readers of your old (2009 - 2013) papers will not be able to find your recent public pronouncements there in Scholar.
Your 2012 paper is cited by 125 papers.
Your 2013 paper is cited by 119 papers.
Your one 2010 paper is also cited by 119 papers.
Your 2009 paper is cited by 992 papers!
Yes, a thorough researcher following you should check all one thousand, and reconcile the differences between your findings and those of others. But not all students have the time or are thorough! :-(
There is nothing stopping you yourself from writing the all-encompassing book now that summarises only the best, most-trusted research that you and your co-authors have done in the past. If you are refereeing a paper and find that it is using outdated references, you can and should inform the writer. If you are an examiner, examining a thesis, then you can fail the candidate for not seeking new references. But you cannot force random authors as to which papers they must cite. :-(
Many problems of the quantitative analysis of citations disappear when using the uniform system of bibliographic identification, and among others, nowadays the most popular one is the DOI (Digital Object Identifier System).
Actually the above mentioned versioning problem and finding the most current resource releated to a given reasearch paper also has been solved by DOI versioning system (e.g. https://blog.zenodo.org/2017/05/30/doi-versioning-launched/) in many repositories. It is enought to start using them.
Thank you Ian Kennedy :). Collating the most up-to-date research in a book is good suggestion (I didn't think of that, seriously). Newer book editions will naturally signal a change in the contents and it will be easy to publish an online index of updates and changes. The only issue is that - as an independent researcher - I find the idea of writing a book quite daunting...I'm more a blogs and tweets person ;-)
Thank you Anna Małgorzata Kamińska ...Zenodo looks very promising; I'll trial it for sure. Just to understand, the solution you are suggesting is to use Zenodo to generate the DOI for all new publications, and when others follow the link back, they will see the newer versions of the same publication? Or are you suggesting something different?
Dear Bilal Succar I am explaining it to you on the example of my publication which is a software plugin, but it is applicable to any other case - also in a case of scientific articles.
I've developed the initial version of the plugin that should be referenced as: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1215008 if you consider implementation details of this specific version.
As soon as you upload the initial version you also get a general DOI that you can use when you consider the general concept - i.e. not related to any specific versions: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1215007
Lately I've developed the newer version that can be referenced as: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1432557
Now let us focus on your use case - someone follows the link pointing the older version: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1215008 worth noting here the message on the above web page: "There is a newer version of this record available." Click on "newer version" and you are automagically redirected to the latest version.
I hope the above explanation is clear enough.
Each morning pretend that you are writing a blog about a bit of your work. Remember to view all thousand citations! At the end of the year put them together as a first draft of your book.
One of the final steps of preparing a manuscript should be to double-check the references. Taking the extra step of including the DOI originally can help speed this process.
Thank you Ian for the tip :)...and thank you Michael W. Marek for suggesting to include a DOI in new publications. As I've now learned from Anna that DOI supports versioning, I'll be including it in most new published materials (including presentations and videos).
If I may, I'd like to extend the discussion a bit:
Building on the two practical suggestions received so far - using DOI and collating research into a book/textbook, I'm wondering whether there are intuitive ways to combine the two ideas into a unified, peer-reviewed, online textbook. I have looked at Booktype.pro before and found it a bit light on the features I'd need. Any suggestions for similar/different solutions that can support multi-part, continuously-updated, academic output?
very interesting and educative discussion. Many thanks to all contributors
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