Chronology of Scientific Publication

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The purpose and ways of presenting the key dates delineating the individual stages of the life cycle of a modern scientific publication are considered. For the author who plans to publish his work in a particular journal, the most interesting dates are the dates of the preliminary stages: reviewing, proofreading, layout, etc. The key date, usually reflected in the bibliographic reference to the published work, is the year of its publication. It is necessary to distinguish between the title year appearing on the cover and in the bibliographic reference, and the actual year recorded in the output of the publication. The title and actual years in some cases may not coincide, which often leads to various misunderstandings. With the advent of the Internet, other dates are also included in the consideration, in particular, the date of application and the date of posting. The date of application is included in the bibliographic reference to indicate when the author of the publication got acquainted with the cited work, which may have been subsequently changed. The posting date is especially relevant for alive online publications, the authors of which constantly keep their work up to date, eliminating the inaccuracies noticed and, most importantly, reflecting the latest achievements in the field under consideration. Here, the reader is particularly interested in the date of posting the latest, fresh version of the publication online. In an online publication, a fresh date can be obtained “on the fly” at the place of its posting and then dynamically embedded directly into the text of the bibliographic reference presented to the reader. This significantly increases the informative value of the reference. The implementation of a dynamic posting date is analyzed for a direct hyperlink to an alive publication, for a hyperlink via a DOI obtained from Crossref, and for a hyperlink to a preprint in arXiv.org.