Not every discipline has a constructive literature. I worked in psycho-linguistics. There's almost no article that provides anything you can build on. Almost al

Not every discipline has a constructive literature. I worked in psycho-linguistics. There's almost no article that provides anything you can build on. Almost all of it is description of experiment and outcome, with some theoretical interpretation, but that is almost always specific to interpretation within a specific theory. But those theories are high-level fantasy about language processing, which makes the interpretation meaningless elsewhere, even if the article did get everything else right (and that's rare too). So there are very few results you can expand upon. Lexical priming turned out to be reproducible and usable as a tool, the Stroop effect too. But those are exceptions. However, they don't explain the underlying mechanism. E.g., the Stroop effect is 90 years old, and there's no explanation of how it works. So if you read text books that explain you the state of the art of around 1980, you're practically up to date as far as real knowledge is concerned. The rest is infighting and publishing for its own sake. And psycho-linguistics at least has some experimental standards, because it is a fairly limited topic and it is suited to lab settings. Other fields don't even have that. Social psychology is a joke. Articles are based on questionnaires and introspection. That's why articles in those fields are not well read. They get read by a small audience, mostly people in the same school of thought, and mostly to add to the citation section. But not for knowledge.