Q15 - More and more academic institutions

[jpbandj]

How does 'A' strengthen the argument?

My breakdown of argument:

Citation analysis is being used for measuring quality of research.

Counts the number of references to a researcher's work yearly from scientific journals.

Scientists maximizing citation counts will avoid multiyear projects for short term projects in faddish areas.

Conclusion: Citation analysis does not actually encourage good research and works against it.

At this point, in the answer choices, I'm looking to strengthen how important multiyear projects are for quality of research and/or how they can't be used in citation analysis. I'm assuming 'A' touches on this?

Or even something in the answers that shows why short term projects in faddish areas are not good.

[aileenann]

Hello there. Thanks for posting such a complete question and your take on the argument. That's always helpful on our end so we can get inside your head a little, and I think it's a great exercise for students to write out their own summaries of an argument when they're asking questions about that argument.

Your summary is a good one, and you correctly identified the conclusion. Then going into the answer choices, I'd be keeping an open mind and working by process of elimination, getting rid of anything that doesn't strengthen the conclusion at all.

In terms of likely ways they could try to strengthen the conclusion, I'd say there's something of an assumption that multi-year projects are stronger for scientific research and there's also an assumption that multi-year projects won't get as many citations. There's also something a little more subtle going on, as schools are actually evaluating individual researchers rather than their individual projects because they are counting up citations for each individual. If I can make any of these assumptions info fact - that is add them via an answer choice, that will strengthen the argument by filling a gap. But I'll also keep in mind that arguments can be strengthened as well by adding supporting premises.

(A) strengthens the conclusion that this way of measuring success will discourage multi-year research and so lower the quality of research by cutting off an alternative you and I don't seem to have thought of. In particular, we could have criticized the argument above for assuming that multi-year projects only get published at the end.

If you imagine a world in which multi-year projects garner publications along the way even when they are not completed, then there is no reason to think that they will be discouraged by this citation counting method of evaluation. However, if we assume (as, in retrospect, this argument does) that the multi-year publications only garner publications at the end of the multiple years, then this strengthens the argument making explicit why multi-year projects are likely to become less popular.

Does that make sense? Hope this helps

[jpbandj]

Awesome! Thanks!

[nbayar1212]

Doesn't E strengthen the argument by providing another reason why citation analysis works against encouraging good research? That is, if scientists "often" cite their colleague's work out of pity, then it seems like works that would not otherwise get attention would be getting a bunch of citation hits and thereby giving the impression that they are based on good research when they otherwise wouldn't be considered to be so.

[sumukh09]

colleague's work out of pity

I don't think "unfairly neglected" implies they cited their colleagues' work out of pity. Unfairly neglected to me means the work was for some reason overlooked by the scientific establishment when the work, according to these select scientists, should have merit.

[samuelfbaron]

Premise: # of citations are indicative of quality (according to this new technique)

Conclusion: Academic institutions want to promote good research, but this technique is actually going against this notion....

..since scientists will potentially seek to maximize citation counts, therefore taking up short term projects instead of long term ones.

Pre-phrasing, I was thinking of something like 'long term projects always are of the strongest quality'. But (A) is the best possible strengthen of all of the answer choices. It supports the idea that research or projects won't be referred to in scientific literature until it is completed, as a result, researchers will be inclined to undertake shorter projects as it will maximize their citation counts via this citation analysis technique.

Hope this helps!

[redcobra21]

Wouldn't (D) also strengthen the argument? The answer choice seemed to suggest that scientists would be unwilling to publish updates regarding their multiyear projects for fear that it would threaten their funding (thereby showing that they would be less inclined to conduct the multiyear projects)

[nbayar1212]

Not exactly.

First, D is wrong because 1. it brings in the new idea of "interim assessment" which isn't mentioned in the stimulus and has no direct link to multi-year projects and 2. we have no way to figuring out how hostility will impact the scientist. I mean, they can be hostile and still engage in the multi-year projects (which would weaken the argument) or be hostile and not engage in them (which would strengthen it). Since it can go both ways, this AC can't really support the argument.

Second, in your explanation you are making a jump from scientists being hostile to the assessments (as stated in the AC) to "unwilling to publish updates." That jump is unsupported. I also am not sure where you are getting the idea of "publishing updates" from - I don't see it in the stimulus nor do I see it in AC D.

Hope this helps clear things up.

[tommywallach]

Hey Guys,

There's enough interest here (and enough questionable advice) that I'm going to explain it bottom to top. Here we go!

It's a strengthen question, so we begin by looking at the core:

Conclusion: CA leads to bad research
Premise: Quality of research defined by CA
Maximize CA by doing short-term, faddish projects

The assumption here is that you can't get a decent CA with long-term projects. We want to STRENGTHEN that assumption.

(A) CORRECT. If there's no way to get cited until you finish your research, then you definitely can't get a high CA by engaging in really long-term projects.

(B) This relates to the idea that the faddish work can be significant. But we would already have assumed that to be true. The bigger issue is that we're incentivizing short-term work.

(C) Criticism is irrelevant. We want to strengthen the idea that you can get a high CA while doing long-term work.

(D) This is a tricky answer, because it does seem to relate to whether or not you can get cited on a long-term project while you're working on it. However, we don't actually know yet if the "interim assessments" in question would allow a piece of research to be cited. Compare to answer choice (A), where it directly says "referred to in journals." These interim assessments might not have anything to do with journals, in which case this answer would be completely irrelevant.

(E) This might strengthen the argument a tiny bit, but not by referencing the assumption. Instead, it's providing another reason why the use of CA might be crappy (because people are inflating the count for personal reasons). However, if scientists think the work is "unfairly neglected," it might actually be a good thing that it's being cited more. In fact, isn't that the whole point of citation in the first place?

Hope that helps!

-t

[james.h.meyers]

Hey Guys,

There's enough interest here (and enough questionable advice) that I'm going to explain it bottom to top. Here we go!

It's a strengthen question, so we begin by looking at the core:

Conclusion: CA leads to bad research
Premise: Quality of research defined by CA
Maximize CA by doing short-term, faddish projects

The assumption here is that you can't get a decent CA with long-term projects. We want to STRENGTHEN that assumption.

(A) CORRECT. If there's no way to get cited until you finish your research, then you definitely can't get a high CA by engaging in really long-term projects.

(B) This relates to the idea that the faddish work can be significant. But we would already have assumed that to be true. The bigger issue is that we're incentivizing short-term work.

(C) Criticism is irrelevant. We want to strengthen the idea that you can get a high CA while doing long-term work.

(D) This is a tricky answer, because it does seem to relate to whether or not you can get cited on a long-term project while you're working on it. However, we don't actually know yet if the "interim assessments" in question would allow a piece of research to be cited. Compare to answer choice (A), where it directly says "referred to in journals." These interim assessments might not have anything to do with journals, in which case this answer would be completely irrelevant.

(E) This might strengthen the argument a tiny bit, but not by referencing the assumption. Instead, it's providing another reason why the use of CA might be crappy (because people are inflating the count for personal reasons). However, if scientists think the work is "unfairly neglected," it might actually be a good thing that it's being cited more. In fact, isn't that the whole point of citation in the first place?

Hope that helps!

-t

Hey Tommywallach I have a question.

I picked (A) because it seemed more direct, but I took "interim assessments" in (D) to just be referring to what happens when a person is cited - others are writing about their work and "assessing" it.

If a scientist is doing multi-year work and they don't want someone assessing their work half-way through then they'll be less likely to publish any partial findings (essentially they will adhere to what is said in answer (A) and not be cited).

So... I took "interim assessments" to mean the work being cited. Perhaps it's a negative citation and would affect funding. And, in fact, I took that to be the plain english understanding of what they were talking about.

Am I bringing too much in? Should I just go with the more direct answer (A)? That's ultimately what I did - but (D) did give me pause.

[WaltGrace1983]

Hey Tommywallach I have a question.

I picked (A) because it seemed more direct, but I took "interim assessments" in (D) to just be referring to what happens when a person is cited - others are writing about their work and "assessing" it.

If a scientist is doing multi-year work and they don't want someone assessing their work half-way through then they'll be less likely to publish any partial findings (essentially they will adhere to what is said in answer (A) and not be cited).

So... I took "interim assessments" to mean the work being cited. Perhaps it's a negative citation and would affect funding. And, in fact, I took that to be the plain english understanding of what they were talking about.

Am I bringing too much in? Should I just go with the more direct answer (A)? That's ultimately what I did - but (D) did give me pause.

Someone correct me if I am mistaken, but even if you take "interim assessments" to actually be citations, (D) still falls short. (D) is saying that, sometimes, scientists don't like people to assess their work of ongoing research. Why? Because it threatens their funding.

First of all, we don't know if ongoing research is short-term or long-term. Remember that in this question a "short-term" project seems to be anything that isn't a "multi-year project," meaning that it very well could be 6 months or even a year long. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that even a month-long research project can be considered "ongoing" at the time. It is not like it is going to be completed in 45 minutes!

Second of all, we don't really need to know WHY these scientists are hostile. Funding is never mentioned in the stimulus and is quite frankly quite irrelevant here.

Third of all, this doesn't connect "hostility" to "good research." We ultimately want to find an explanation why short-term projects are not correlated with good research. However, just because someone is hostile doesn't mean anything about how good the research is. So they are hostile. So what? This doesn't do much to the argument.

(A) strengthens by showing that these long-term projects will not receive citations until they are completed! If this is true, this would mean that these scientists are very restricted - they can only do short-term projects if they are truly hoping for the most citation counts. Now this doesn't mean that short-term projects are still not as good as long-term projects in terms of how "good" the research is, so it is not the most flagrant strengthener. However, being restricted is often not a very good thing, especially for research.

While we are at it, I actually think (B) is a pretty explicit weakener. It is saying that these short-term projects in "faddish" areas can actually have some significance, perhaps showing that they lead to "good" research. For (C), we don't know anything about research that is criticized so I am unsure how this could ever strengthen. (E) could weaken by showing that scientists just cite their friends when they think that the research was good or it could strengthen by showing that the stuff that is actually good receives the proper amount of citation (assuming that the scientists can accurately understand how good research is). Thus, its pretty vague and not very potent for this stimulus.

[tommywallach]

As usual, Walt knocks the explanation out of the park. Let me know if there's any lingering confusion, James!

-t

[eve.lederman]

I'm reading this forum so many times and breaking down this question but I still don't see how A strengthens! The conclusion that we want to strengthen is that using CA won't encourage good research. (A), i think, weakens because if scientific research isn't completed, then it's won't be able to be in the citation counts.

[brandoncbias]

You're on the right track but you've misunderstand the implications of A.

Conclusion: Citation Analysis undermines the goal of encouraging good research

Premises: Quality of research is measured by citation analysis + scientists maximizing citation counts can do so by avoiding multiyear projects and doing short-term faddish ones instead

The author is assuming researchers can accumulate more citation counts during a given period doing short-term faddish projects than doing multiyear ones.

A) Like you mentioned, if scientific research isn't completed, then it won't be able to count towards the citation counts. This would be because research must first be finished in order to be cited. However this reveals a clear advantage to the short-term faddish projects. Scientists can perform more of the short-term projects in a given number of years than multiyear projects, thereby gaining more citations.

You may be reasoning that you can accumulate more citation counts on a multiyear project than a single short-term one and/or that a multiyear project's citation count equals those accumulated by the several short-term projects that could be done in the same amount of time(As I did), but the author's use of "faddish" accounts for this. If they are faddish, they are more popular and would be referenced more often than normal.

[maryadkins]

Great explanation!

Think about it this way. Say an author is evaluated on how good she is by how many people "Like" her books on Facebook. But some authors write TONS of books, one every few months, so they have tons of Likes. Other authors may write one book every decade. So when their books get published, they get fewer Likes, because their one book hasn't had nearly as much of an opportunity to get Likes. Does this make that author a worse author? No! The system of deciding who is the best author is missing the point.

That's one way of thinking about the argument, and (A) affirms that by saying yes, it's true. The authors who take longer are not being taken into consideration, which is a bad thing...just like the person making the argument thinks it's a bad thing.

[ganbayou]

I was just wondering...
So even though they take longer time to finish a project that also does not mean it has good quality right?
In the argument it says the number of references they get decides its quality, but actual quality-whether it really has good quality-is another issue, right?
I think I got confused because the argument implies as if people engage in multiyear projects they can provide good research (=the goal)...but it's not necessarily true, right?
I'm sorry I cannot spell out my questions well

[maryadkins]

Right, so the whole point about how people won't do multiyear projects (projects that take multiple years to complete) but instead will do short-term projects only makes sense if it relates to the quality of research being produced. Otherwise, it wouldn't even make sense in the context of the argument. So the only reasonable interpretation here is that the reason CA "works against this goal" of quality research is because they take on short-term projects over longer-term ones.

Now you could have had an answer choice clearly stating that short-term projects are of worse quality than longer-term projects, and that would have been a good strengthener, too, since you make the good point that it's never actually STATED this is the case. But of these five choices, none do that. So (A) is best.

[robinzhang7]

Hey all,

I think I have a more intuitive way to grasp this problem. I think (A) is the assumption between the Premises and the Sub-Conclusion.

Look at it this way:

Premise: Academic institutions are using CA to measure quality of research
Sub-Conclusion: Since they want to maximize citation counts, they will choose short-term over long-term projects

WHOAH! That should make you question how in the world they went from using CA to deciding that short term is better than long-term in maxing out citations. After all, couldn't long-term citations garner just as many. There doesn't seem to be any sort of significant difference between short-term vs. long-term other than the length of the project itself. Keep that in mind. We somehow have to prove that short-term projects are where the citation "money" is at.

MAIN Conclusion: Use of CA actually undermines good research

Again, WHOAH! How did we just get from researchers favoring short-term projects to having CA undermine good research. Ahh.... the assumption must be that favoring short-term projects undermines good research and that long-term projects are the ones that bolster good research.

Okay, so we're off! We have all the assumptions in place. Let's be flexible in our thinking and realize that there are assumptions between both the premise-sub conclusion and sub conclusion-main conclusion.

Look at (A). Wow that's definitely the assumption between the premise and the sub conclusion. It's saying that researchers are disadvantaged by doing long-term projects because they will receive lower numbers of citations due to this dumb general rule of thumb that "you can only be referred to after ALL your research has been completed." What a restriction geez...... (A) is exactly what we thought.

Answer choice (E) actually weakens. How? Notice that the LSAT makers slipped in the phrase: "unfairly neglected." Well if these works are unfairly neglected, that must been that these works actually have a merit and thereby, citing them, would lead to good research! That's the exact opposite of what the author in the stimulus is going for.

What do you guys think?