The legacy of articles.

It is essential for a researcher to read articles related to their subject. Article reading helps inform and inspire the researcher. Most peered reviewed articles help, from recent ones to older ones. Recently published articles are very useful for finding current pieces of data and new ideas that can help research. On the other side of the spectrum older articles deepen the researchers understanding of their growing subject.  For the past week I have been reading these older articles.

This older articles age make their data slightly out of date and devoid of the most current theories, but reading them has its uses. While read these articles I witnessed the creation of ideas that at the time of publication were new, but now are basic theories. Watching the creation of these ideas helped me understand our subject on an all-new level. To use metaphor, its like knowing how to tell time on a watch compared to understanding how the watches gears lace together. I’ll give a example from one of the articles I read.

The last article I read was ‘Error in Medicine’ by Lucian L. Leape MD. This piece of work was published in 1994 on J.A.M.A. The article explores ideas about sources of medicinal disruption, primarily the mentality held in the medical field. This mentality is a sense of responsibility and fear exposing failure. This mentality makes it hard for medical staff to expose their failure so they can be helped improved by others, thus disruption continue. This idea is now basic in the subject we are studying and rally fully explained in recent articles. Reading an article that fully explains the idea in its most fundamental form helps me deepen my understanding of this subject.