Editorial: Recent references

In addition to editing Education & Self Development I am on the reviewer panel for other journals in the field. I never begrudge the work involved in reviewing: it gives me insights into what other researchers are thinking, long before their work reaches the stage of being published. It also gives me a way of moderating the reviewing activities of E&SD so that we are matching the standards of other journals. This piece was prompted by a discussion between the authors and reviewers of an article submitted to one of these journals. It concerned the recency of the references and I recalled that on several occasions over the past few months, submissions to E&SD had been criticised because many of the references were ‘old’ – that is, published more than ten years ago. It is a simple matter to read through the list of references and count the number that are more than, say, ten years old, but that does not necessarily mean that they do not have value. In contrast to high energy particle physics, our field of education and psychology moves relatively slowly.