Given the fact that a paper under good refereed journals takes more than a year to see the light of the day, the findings/results likely become obsolete by the time such a paper is released, as the passage of time brings about new variables, perhaps new outcomes. What do you think?
Dear Abdu Al Kadi , no, in general I do not think that long review/publication times render research findings obsolete, as long as authors and reviewers mind certain quality criteria.
I can totally understand why certain disciplines start to favor the format of conference contributions over journal articles, particularly in fields where it is necessary to be fast in order to keep up with recent developments (e.g., like I have witnessed it for Natural Language Processing).
In my view, conferences are ideal places for innovations whereas journals should be focused more towards sustainability.
We could take the vast amount of studies concerning different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic as examples illustrating what I mean by that: An ad-hoc paper on the sentiment changes that could be observed in social media during the global lockdown(s) is interesting now but probably not so interesting any more a year from now. Thus, it would be much more suitable for a conference or direct publication formats (such as arXiv.org). A paper building on the sentiment changes that could be observed during the global lockdown(s) in order to infer general aspects of emotion dynamics during phases of fear and insecurity might well be interesting even 10 or 20 years from now and thus be well placed in a journal.
This, however, also means that I would argue that there should be a checkbox for this discussion of the findings in a broader context, resp. the sustainability of the results on every journal reviewer's list of evaluation criteria.
I agree with Annika Hamachers but do feel that the statistics and other numeric figures cited in the introduction and literature review do age more rapidly and not as relevant in papers that have shorter publication period. If possible, I suggest that ones uses predicted/forecasted statistics and other numeric figures if available, so that these do not age as quickly.
Hello Abdu Al Kadi
I worry that books are even more likely to contain information that loses relevance by the time they are printed and bought by university students and such people. Does that mean, we should learn more from online sources?
Absolutely correct. In most cases, you may also lose interest when the review process takes long
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