Abstract
In (tourism) scholarship, the published article is often presented as a monolithic, static output, obscuring the iterative and often messy reality of manuscript evolution. Furthermore, current editorial metadata sustains an ‘illusion of finality’, sanitising the intellectual friction of peer review. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge and the science in action framework, this work develops a case for the integration of evolutionary metadata. By adopting a tripartite framework of temporal, developmental, and structural transparency, we posit shifting our perception of research as a static commodity to a dynamic intellectual history, providing a vital pedagogical tool for (doctoral/early-career) researchers.