The study analyzed the time lag between biomedical articles and cited studies labeled as "recent." The age of the cited "recent" studies ranged from 0 to 37 years, with a mean of 5.53 years and a median of 4 years (interquartile range 2-7 years). The most frequent delay was 1 year (159 cases, 15.9%), while 177 references (17.7%) were older than 10 years. In fields such as critical care, infectious diseases, genetics, immunology and radiology, the median delay was around 2 years, while in nephrology, veterinary medicine and dentistry it was 8.5 to 14 years. The terms "recent access", "recent discovery" and "recent study" were associated with older citations, while "recent publication" and "recent article" were associated with more recent material. The lag decreased over time, was similar in all regions, and journals with a high impact factor (≥12) cited more recent work. The authors advise readers and reviewers to take claims of "recent" evidence with a chronological grain of salt.