LR Question 15 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: More and more academic institutions…
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: Citation analysis discourages good research
REASONING: Citation analysis will cause scientists to seek citations above all else. They will thus focus on short projects rather than multiyear projects.
ANALYSIS: The argument claims that citation analysis will cause scientists to focus on quantity over quality. It’s a pretty good argument, but it would be stronger if we knew that there was no way to cite a multi-year project until it was complete. Answer choice A tells us this is the case.
___________
- CORRECT. This makes multi-year research much harder to cite.
- The argument did not claim that no significant work will ever be published. Only that multiyear work is important too, and it will be discouraged.
- This has nothing to do with anything. Besides, if you’re criticizing a scientist’s work, you’re still citing it.
- “Sometimes?” Does this mean once every 1000 experiments or 75% of the time? This is too vague.
- This weakens the argument, showing that neglected work will still be cited.
Recap: The question begins with “More and more academic institutions”. It is a Strengthen question. Learn how to master LSAT Strengthen questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.
More Resources for Strengthen Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Strengthen questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers strengthen questions.
I do not understand how answer A is strengthening the argument when the argument is that the citation analysis discourages good research… wouldn’t you want to prove the research the analyists are providing is weak further discouraging good quality research… AKA answer E
The core claim here is: yearly citation counts -> scientists try to maximize citations -> they avoid multi-year projects.
What needs support is the link between yearly citation counts and avoiding long-term projects. A does that by telling us that research isn’t cited in journals until it’s completed.
So if a project takes many years, it will generate no citations during those years. That directly strengthens why scientists who care about annual counts would rationally avoid multi-year work.
E is muddy at best. As Graeme says, it might weaken the argument if we interpret “unfairly neglected” work as actually good research, that just happens to be neglected for some unknown reason. So if people are still citing this good research, then that weakens the argument by showing that citation analysis doesn’t discourage good research.
If you interpreted “unfairly neglected” work to mean bad research, then E would be saying that scientists are still citing bad research because of the importance of citation analysis, which could strengthen the argument. But I don’t think there’s a clear case of interpreting “unfairly neglected” = bad research.
Either way, E only tells us why someone might choose to cite a paper once it exists. It does not explain how multi-year vs. short-term projects are impacted by citation analysis. We need to explain why scientists are choosing quantity over quality, which is what A does, not E.
Hope that helps! Let me know if you have further questions.