KakaJaja
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Q13 - The soaring prices of scholarly

by KakaJaja Wed Nov 14, 2012 2:56 am

Hey guys, I narrowed down to D&E, but finally chose E. Because I thought that due to the "spill-over" effect, libraries that subscribe the widely read journals may miss the journals that really start the controversy. Can anyone explain? Thx!
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demetri.blaisdell
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Re: Q13 - The soaring prices of scholarly

by demetri.blaisdell Fri Nov 23, 2012 4:53 pm

Thanks for posting. The claim we are trying to weaken is the standard we use to determine a journal's usefulness: the number of time it has been cited. So we're looking for something that makes us think that number won't be a good way to measure usefulness.

(D) gives us exactly that. It tells us that some authors use a given article quite a bit but are embarrassed to cite to it. Thus, the article is used a lot but cited a little. Number of citations is a bad measure of usefulness.

Wrong answers:

(A) is out of scope. We only care about researchers in the discipline (not non-academic readers).

(B) is also out of scope. The cost is for the subscription, not for the page. Length of article is irrelevant.

(C) is out of scope for the same reason as (A). The general public isn't part of the argument.

(E) doesn't address the citations. It says that one journal will begin a dispute that other journals will pick up on. But won't the researchers cite all the articles? Why exactly would they miss the original journal? It seems like other journals that enter the controversy would probably refer to the original (but it doesn't matter whether they do or not). This doesn't tell us why number of citations is a bad measure of usefulness.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

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Re: Q13 - The soaring prices of scholarly

by cvfh17 Sat Apr 06, 2013 9:21 pm

can you explain more detail the the argumente what really about im a little confuse why D is the answear choice? Thanks
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Re: Q13 - The soaring prices of scholarly

by WaltGrace1983 Sat Apr 19, 2014 4:24 pm

cvfh17 Wrote:can you explain more detail the the argumente what really about im a little confuse why D is the answear choice? Thanks


There really isn't much of a core to this one but the main idea is this: "One can determine the general usefulness of an article by the frequency it is cited. Thus, decisions should be made on this basis."

So we want to show why number of citations is actually NOT a good indicator of usefulness. Couldn't it be that articles are useful, not because they get cited often, but rather because they have a good array of information written in a succinct manner? Couldn't the usefulness of these articles be measured by other things such as the magazine it came from? All I am thinking in my head is to show WHY the number of citations doesn't exactly equal the usefulness of that article.

(D) is right because it does show why there may be an inverse relationship between usefulness and citation count. That is, it shows that an article can be highly useful while not being cited as frequently as others.

    It says that "Researchers often will not cite an article that has influenced their work." So "influenced their work" would be a good way to say that the article was "useful" to those researchers. Also notice that we are not talking about what some researchers do sometimes, we are talking about what researchers do often! This is a general maxim. Following this, it just gives a reason why researchers do what they do, which isn't nearly as important as the beginning part of the answer choice.

    So as you can see, it shows that USEFULNESS and CITATION COUNT are not always related. Something can be highly useful while not being cited.


As for the others...


    (A) This actually strengthens the suggestion because it shows that there are some cases in which some types of articles can be assessed for usefulness from citation count. Granted, it is not the best strengthener because we don't know how nonacademic readership applies but it could still strengthen a bit.

    (B) Length doesn't matter at all. We would be making unwarranted assumptions if we said length was important.

    (C) So what? They are less available. Are they more useful or less useful? Why? Why not?

    (E) This still has nothing to do with citation count and we can eliminate it quickly


Hope that helps.
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Re: Q13 - The soaring prices of scholarly

by Chrisleen Sat Feb 21, 2015 2:30 pm

First of all, I want you to eliminate the useless info, such as discipline, in the stimulus, and only the useful info should be kept. I think that in this question, at first, we should make it clear that the stimulus conveys such a logic to us that in order to cut the length of the scholar and scientific journals,the academic libraries should reduce their list of description, and it's the usefulness that determines which should be kept and which should be reduced. Therefore, the author created a criterion for us--that is the frequency of the articles cited, which means that the more frequently an article is cited the more useful the article is. However the stem ask us to weaken the argument. In order to make it, we need to show that frequence is not the only criterion for usefulness of the article, which means that either the articles that are cited frequently are not useful, or the useful articles are not cited frequently. Thus, it is clear that answer D delivers that an article which though is useful will not be cited frequently just because it appears in a journal that is not highly regarded by the leading researchers. But there does exist a trick that the test makers use "has influenced their work" to replace the "useful".