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What fields do you see this in? I read a lot of social science-y academic articles for research for a nonfiction book I’m writing, and I would be very frustrate
by DiggyJohnson 4y ago
What fields do you see this in? I read a lot of social science-y academic articles for research for a nonfiction book I’m writing, and I would be very frustrated if a date wasn’t included at the front of the article.
Though I’m not sure if I’ve been lulled into a fall sense of security by finding the date on the cover sheet of the PDF (prepended by the article’s publisher/distributer, I imagine).
In no way am I disagreeing with you, more sharing the fact that I’d be surprised and frustrated to come across this omission. Author and publishing date are arguably more important than the title, in my opinion - which now that I think about it is probably why these are the metadata we use to index citations.
- anyfoo 4y agoComputer Science/Math. Here's an almost completely random example, I literally searched for "graph coloring paper" just because that was a subject I could think of top of my head, and found this as first hit: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/Papers/coloring_worstcase.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/Papers/coloring_worstcase.pdf Yep, no date.
- maxov 4y agoIn case you do not know, I find Google Scholar to be pretty useful for finding dates and other information about the paper - e.g. in this case https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=New+Approximation+Algorithms+for+Graph+Coloring&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=New... I work with papers in CS/math and have been able to find dates and metadata like DOI pretty quick. There are complications when there are really multiple versions of a paper, like one in a conference that is only an extended abstract and one in a journal, but you would need to figure out which version you want to read in that situation anyway. I agree it's annoying, but coupled with reference manager software like Zotero it's hardly an issue for me.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoGoogle Scholar is a great tool but I fear its days are numbered. It's already frustrating that they removed the feature hot linking to an article's scholar page if you enter the title in google search.
- maxov 4y agoIf Google Scholar is sunset that would be a great loss for the academic community. When was that feature removed? I have felt reasonably confident in Google Scholar so far because it is already 18 or so years old.
- bombcar 4y agoYou deduce a lower bound for the date based on the years of cited publications
- joppy 4y agoThat’s a preprint - check the published version https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/176584.176586 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/176584.176586 which has a date on the front page of the article.
- anyfoo 4y agoThat's a good point. Given how many apparent preprints I come across, though, I wish they'd just put a date on the front page, too.