LSAT 151 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q13

LR Question 13 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: When scientific journals began to offer full online access …

QUESTION TYPE: Paradox

PARADOX: Even though scientists got access to more articles, they ended up citing a narrower, more overlapping set of articles.

ANALYSIS: Scientists have access to more journals and articles now. So why did this lead to more concentration instead of diversity?

You want to identify a feature of this online access that might have led them to focus on the same articles even more.

Some ideas could be:

• Algorithms highlight the same “top” results
• They can filter to see which articles are most cited
• Recommendation systems (e.g. “Related articles”) push the same sources

All of these point to the same idea: more access doesn’t automatically mean more diversity. If the system funnels attention toward the same top articles, you actually get more clustering.

___________

1. Even if top journals went online first, that doesn’t explain the behavior change.
2. Who uses online access more doesn’t matter for this clustering.
3. So there’s a bias for authors you know. But that bias exists regardless of online access, so why did things shift toward more clustering after online access?
4. More journals should mean more variety, if anything. This actually makes the outcome more confusing, not less.
5. CORRECT. If online tools make it easier to find the “most highly regarded” articles, then everyone will gravitate toward citing those same few sources. Before, maybe it wasn’t as easy to know how highly regarded things were so you used an article if you liked it. That explains why more access led to less diversity.