In medical journals, recent can mean last year or the late 1980s. When two researchers in Madrid examined 1,000 biomedical papers that described a cited study as recent, they found references ranging from zero to 37 years old.
Nearly one in five of those recent references, 177 in all, pointed to work that was at least a decade old. The analysis, published in December 2025 in The BMJ's Christmas issue, suggests the word often signals importance or novelty more than a date on the calendar.
