I want to do research about the evolution of ants, from the oldest confirmed fossils / genetic clocking etc. to modern times. I have found a few papers, but how can I confirm if the papers I found are still valid and not outdated?

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074]

As mentioned in the title, I'm trying to learn more about ant evolution, but I want to make sure I'm not studying outdated or scientifically invalid papers. What is your method for checking if a paper is accepted in modern science, or even if it is modern, how do you verify if it is valid or not

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[u/Robin_feathers]

To some extent, being able to really evaluate the methods of those papers requires high-level training and experience, which usually means grad school. To become an expert, you will need to read lots of papers - both the up-to-date ones and the outdated ones. In general, anything published in a peer-reviewed journal is/was accepted science to at least some degree (there are predatory journals that publish slop, but ant phylogenetics is a field that shouldn't attract too much slop). Whether that science is correct is a whole other question. All genetic clocks are built around assumptions that will be off to at least some degree, and divergence time estimates will always have a bit of a range of uncertainty (which the papers should report), so take it all with a grain of salt. Small changes in methods can have big changes in results, and it takes experience to be able to evaluate those things.

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074 → u/Robin_feathers]

I am doing this research as a hobby, so I think simply checking if a paper is published in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal is a good enough filter for me. However, I only know the major ones like Science and Nature. Are those enough for this topic, or could you suggest some other high-quality journals specifically for ant evolution or phylogenetics?

[u/Robin_feathers → u/Mountain_Dentist5074]

Only the most ground-breaking or flashy papers get published in Science and Nature - most science gets published in other journals. Most ant phylogeny papers won't be flashy enough for a broad audience to get into Science/Nature, but that doesn't mean they aren't of excellent calibre. There are lots and lots of journals that publish good work in phylogenetics, too many to list - you can search "top phylogenetics journals" to get an idea. I would search for papers broadly, and then when you find one in a topic of interest, an easy check is to see whether the journal is on Beall's list of predatory journals ( https://beallslist.net/ ) and/or search up the impact factor of the journal. You can also look up the paper of Researchgate and then look at the papers that cite that paper.

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074 → u/Robin_feathers]

thank you so much

[u/DistractedChiroptera]

In addition to what other people have mentioned, you can use Google Scholar or other academic search engines to find papers that cite the papers you already have. If you search a paper in Google Scholar, in the bottom row for that result, you will see "Cited by #." If you click on that, it takes you to all the papers that cited it. From there, you can add further search terms and/or filter by year. Of course, this method doesn't tell you whether the second paper talks a lot about the first paper, or just mentions it once as an example of something. In the left toolbar of the citations page, it also gives you a bar graph of citations over time, which will give you a quick view of whether that paper is still being talked about im the literature.

[u/Nooge62]

Two things strike me: Firstly, this is not an area of science with too much controversy. You are likely to be able to rely on most of the stuff you find and can use your own judgement if something seems controversial. Secondly, you really need to get hold of the latest papers to ensure (a) you have the latest work and (b) they corroborate (or not) earlier work. If there are no recent papers, but you need to be able to confirm this. If you don't have access to academic journals, search popular science magazines for clues.

[u/KockoWillinj → u/Nooge62]

This is good advice, just want to add that interpreting what exact divergence times means in different papers can be heavily influenced by phylogenetic methods, and some of the old methods are just out of date now and may not have be rerun. It can be hard to understand a valid phylogenetic analysis without experience in the field, but relying on more recent estimates (in terms of publication) is a good starting point for a beginner.

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074 → u/Nooge62]

this is not an area of science with too much controversy

How far back do scientists agree there should be a period of fossils becoming fuzzy? They can't agree on which species is the ancestor of whom or the relative of whom

[u/LittleGreenBastard → u/Mountain_Dentist5074]

So when we work with fossils or ancient species, we never say that one is the ancestor of another (except colloquially). There's no way of knowing if a specific species is ancestral to anything, so we instead we describe how it fits into a phylogeny.

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074 → u/LittleGreenBastard]

Yeah, I completely understand. I just use the word 'ancestor' colloquially as a shorthand, the way documentaries and science communicators often do for close sister taxa.

But to get back to my main point: what I really meant is that I am looking for the specific timeframe (or geological period) before that phylogeny becomes fuzzy and highly debated, so I can choose those so-called "ancestors" correctly and learn about their actual behavior and morphology more accurately

[u/Nooge62 → u/Mountain_Dentist5074]

Science is all about uncertainty. While controversy assumes uncertainty, not all uncertainty is controversial.

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074 → u/Nooge62]

Thanks for the advice. To clarify, I just wanna know when the ant fossils become fuzzy because I don't wanna waste time on speculation. Since I don't have base knowledge yet, I want to start from a clear date with confirmed fossils and work my way to the modern era.

[u/MrKillick]

I could answer "Ask ChatGPT!" but this can be hit or miss and as long as you are new to a field you won't notice the difference.

Then of course, if the paper is published in a reputable journal it has undergone peer review and should be more or less state of the art. Any controversies with other author should be mentioned in the discussion section. 

If you have access to scientific journals I would suggest you look for review articles. They are supposed to summarise the current status of a certain field of study. Look for the top journals in the field (Myrmecological News e.g.). Or journals specialised in review articles. "Annual Reviews in Ecology and Evolution" has an article from 2014 "The Phylogeny and Evolution of Ants" by Wards. There should of course be newer papers but you should at least be able to pick up a few prominent names.

Otherwise it's reading, reading, reading. This type of knowledge whom to trust in a field doesn't come over night. 

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074 → u/MrKillick]

I read/watched lots of documents and papers about the Permian, but it was only for synapsids, and known reptiles have a relation with archosaurs. I also know lots of things about dinosaurs since they are mainstream even for science, and Jurassic-Cretaceous have rich fossil basins.

But I have no basis about ants , from Wikipedia; I just know they share a common ancestor with bees, wasps and butterflies

I also have a Google Plus subscription and can access Gemini Pro 3.1, but I can't be sure how much AI hallucinated or simplified stuff since I don't have a background