Q13 - When scientific journals began to offer full online

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Explain/Resolve

Stimulus Breakdown:
Scientists gained easier access to more journals and older articles.
YET - instead of citing a broader variety of articles than before, they increased how much they cited the same articles as other scientists.

Answer Anticipation:
GIVEN THAT they had access to more articles than before,
WHY IS IT THAT scientists were mainly citing the same articles?

We don't need to predict answers here, but my first thoughts would be "maybe scientists were already looking at the highest quality, most vetted, most reputable articles before", or "maybe the new online system involves some SHARE feature that makes it even more likely that scientists would end up reading the same article"

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) "A few" is too weak to even keep reading on a first pass. Even if we revisit this and read the whole thing, there's no clear connection to scientists citing the same thing as each other.

(B) "writing a lot" or "most enthusiastic" don't have any common sense bridge to "scientists citing the same articles as each other".

(C) This is relevant to the outcome (scientists citing what others have cited), but it doesn't make any sense how the change (online access to more journals) would relate to the meaningful trait in this answer choice (whether you know a scientist or don't)

(D) "Several new" is pretty weak sounding, and it's not clear why these new journals would lead to scientists citing the same thing.

(E) YES! This is kinda similar to my first hunch. The "same articles" that are being cited are the most vetted, most reputable, "most highly regarded". And it sounds like the online searching even had some sort of Upworthy / Quora / DigIt / Reddit type algorithm where the more popular responses were sent to the top.

Takeaway/Pattern: Explain/Resolve questions are a nice break from having to "solve the riddle" of the flawed argument. We just go to the answers with a clear goal of explaining the surprising fact. In this case, it was "why are scientists usually citing the same articles?" From there, it's just seeing if there's a common sense bridge between the answer choice detail and the question we're trying to answer.

#officialexplanation

[Wenjin]

I’m having trouble with this question and I approach it differently. I chose A because “a few” limited the number of the articles that scholars might cite overlappingly. Whereas for E, I’m thinking that the articles with most highly regarded views might be more than a few, therefore hard to explain why they cite the same ones.

Am I missing anything?

[ohthatpatrick]

I think you read (A) to say
"a few of the most famous journals were the first to offer full online access", so you thought there would be a scarcity of material online initially, and all the scientists would be looking at the same few journals.

But it says that "a few of the big ones were among the first". We have no way to quantity what that means. That could mean, out of the 20 journals that were the first to offer online access, a few of them were the most trusted journals.

For (E), there could be tons of different articles that scientists commonly site. It doesn't have to a particularly small number for there to be a greater tendency of matching citations.

Maybe in 1990, scientists cited 20,000 different experiments.
In 2010, a similar number of articles came out, but scientists cited only 12,000 different experiments.
That would be a greater tendency to cite the same articles.

Hope this helps.

[Wenjin]

Thanks a lot Patrick! I’ll have to be more careful towards those details!

[CharlesT757]

Can some go into why (C) is wrong? Is it because of the fact that we don't know which scientists have met each other? Or even that we don't know who is a prominent scientist?

[Misti Duvall]

Yep. As Patrick notes above, answer choice (C) can be eliminated because we don't have any information about whether they know each other and/or have met. It just says "fellow scientists."