| >Is waiting 5 years always an option? If your goal, as stated above, is to get a "broad knowledge", then yes. If you want to know recent research trends, or are doing research yourself, then no, go read current papers. >Is 5 years always enough to distinguish good from bad science? No, sometimes you have to wait even more. Just gave it as a delay period to counter the "read the peer reviewed papers" notion. >Then, you still use the "peer reviewed" filtering, just add "test of time" to the pipeline. No, I'm saying "forget the peer reviewed" in themselves, go for items that not only have stood the "test of time", but have also become succesful and well regarded books and/or university guides in their domain. In essense, I'm saying that a journal's tiny "peer review" team is BS, the majority of the scientific community agreeing on matured material is better. >Which is fine, as long as the topic is of level of importance to you at which being 5 years behind the trend is ok. It's not a matter of "importance to you", it's what you want to use it for. A subject could be extremely important to you as a study subject, and you could still avoid losing time with the current, unfiltered, papers as they come in. It's only when you want to take advantage of recent research (e.g because you are a researcher yourself, or an implementor and needs a new solution etc) that you have to have the latest research -- which I think is different than "importance". Let's call it "business importance" if you wish... |