LSAT 4 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q13

LR Question 13 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: The soaring prices of scholarly and scientific journals…

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: The suggestion is to only stock those journals that are most cited.

REASONING: It is presumed that those journals with the most citations are the most useful.

ANALYSIS: Citations do provide some indication of how useful a journal is. But they are not a perfect indicator. For example, researchers may cite something that they disagree with and do not think is useful.

The correct answer will give us a reason why citations are not a perfect indicator of usefulness.

___________

1. Academic libraries are not at all concerned with non-academic readership of a journal.
2. So? Libraries are deciding which journals to keep within each discipline. They will be comparing history journals to other history journals.
3. Academic libraries are concerned with how useful journals are to academics. General public readership is not relevant.
4. CORRECT. This shows that researchers might not cite some articles that they find useful. Meaning that citations are an imperfect guide to which articles are useful.
5. If both articles are cited then this shouldn’t make a difference.

Recap: The question begins with “The soaring prices of scholarly and scientific journals”. It is a Weaken question. Learn how to master LSAT Weaken questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.