Now that even the highest ‘impact’ journals are available online, today’s invention is to provide a means by which any of the authors’ later publications, on the same subject, can be injected as an Appendix (perhaps appearing in red).
This would allow all readers to determine how up to date the thinking in any given publication was and avoid wasting time reading work that subsequently went nowhere.
A smart electronic journal would be able to do this automatically, at least for new developments to papers which had appeared in it previously -by grabbing a reference from the current copy.