When writing research grant, we are always reminded to provide citations within the last 5 years. This makes a lot of sense since we want to make sure that the work that we are proposing are up-to-date.
You wouldn’t want to propose a research which have been done before or in a worse something which has been reported to be obselete. As such, performing literature reviews of current up-to-date allows us to confirm the validity and suitability of the proposed project.
But can we cite research articles or technical report longer than the past 5 years? What about when preparing manuscript for publication? Do I cite old papers?
To answer this question, we should revisit the main purpose of citation – to give credit to those who have conducted prior work. If we hold on to this principle, then there is by no means any reason not to cite old research papers.
But it doesn’t mean that all the references cited in the proposal (or research article) can be old papers. And it is certainly not OK to not have recent references. But it just means that it is perfectly fine to quote old papers when necessary.
I came across an article entitled “Tensor part of the Skyrme energy density functional: Spherical nuclei” by Lesinski et al. in the Physical Review C (which is part of the Physical Review series which is a rather prestigous physics journal). The first sentence starts with:
The strong nuclear spin-orbit interaction in nuclei is responsible for the observed magic numbers in heavy nuclei [1–4].
where the references numbering 1 to 4 are:
[1] M. Goeppert Mayer, Phys. Rev. 74, 235 (1948).
[2] O. Haxel, J. H. D. Jensen, and H. E. Suess, Phys. Rev. 75, 1766 (1949).
[3] E. Feenberg and K. C. Hammack, Phys. Rev. 75, 1877 (1949).
[4] M. Goeppert Mayer, Phys. Rev. 75, 1969 (1949).
These are rather old research articles but it make sense to cite them here because they are the pioneers / discoverers of the impact of the spin-orbit interaction. Hence citing these papers acknowledges their contribution to the work that come after them.
