Many of the best sources of information will be ones that have been recently written.  Current articles offer up-to-date statistics and information, and usually, the newest research on your topic.  This is not to say that older sources can’t be valuable, but you need to make that decision.  If you, for example, were writing a history of AIDS, older books might be useful for finding out how it was treated ten or twenty years ago.  If your assignment, however, is about current AIDS therapies, then your sources need to be current.

Look at the publication date on the back of the book's title page (if you have not already done so on Voyager) or the front cover of a magazine, and ask yourself a couple of questions.

• Do I need a historical overview for my paper?(For example do you need a history of the ideas and debates on your subject?)  If this is the case, a current publication date is not vital.
  
  

• Am I working on a contemporary topic and thus need more current material?  If your research topic is something like "Water Pollution," materials published before the 1950's are not likely to contain information on the dumping of toxic wastes into our drinking water.  With this topic, you should begin your research for information dated after the 1950's.