I understand the idea that someone referring to 1994 as “the late 1900s,” is pretty funny, but in my experience as an undergrad, most professors would ask you to use a more recent article if the citation was anything more than an anecdote
Depends from the field really, a math paper from the 70s would be considered fairly recent in some cases.
In my school they’re still doing environmental classes with a textbook from last century…
I took a quantum physics class that used a textbook from the 70s, and it only covered ideas discovered around the 20s. Most courses only need really old knowledge
Except I’ve caught shit for using references from 1995, so it’s a reasonable question if oddly worded.
Valid question. In most fields, research from that date would be very obsolete.
As others said, it depends on the research field. I’m a biologist, and when I was a student, we needed to write a report about a certain worm of the phylum Nematomorpha that we found when doing field research. Turns out that the “most recent” references for Mexico about that group were from the 1930s! So I wrote to an expert from the University of Arizona (I think) and he confirmed my findings: there are almost no research about those worms in my country. So we completed our report with those old references and our teacher said it was good. In fact, in evolutive biology, systematics and taxonomy is not so rare to cite papers even from the 19th century, but surely we are an exception 🤷🏻♂️.
