To evaluate whether a source's date of creation is important one must think about their topic and consider the following:

1. Is the topic in a scientific field that is prone to constant change such as a computer science or medicine?

2. Have there been recent advances made in the field that could affect your research?

If currency is an important issue to your topic, then there are certain things that you should be aware of when evaluating the appropriateness of your sources. For example, look at the creation dates of the list of references found at end of your articles. If an article was written recently but the information used to create the article's content is out-dated then it may not have the value that it appears to have.