Scientific research that involves international collaboration has produced papers of greater influence, as measured b...

Mehran June 12, 2018

Hi @Kathy3755, thanks for your post. Let's first assess the stimulus.

This stimulus presents an argument, the conclusion of which is "This difference shows that research projects conducted by international research teams are of greater importance than those conducted by single researchers." What premise is given in support of this claim? "Papers that result from international collaboration are cited an average of 7 times, whereas papers with single authors are cited only 3 times on average."

This is a poor argument. Would you agree that the number of "likes" a social media post receives is not necessarily proportional to how important that post is in the grand scheme of things? Analogously, why is the simple number of citations dispositive? What if all these citations are in inferior journals that no one reads, for example? The stimulus presents a weak and problematic claim. The question stem asks you to strengthen this argument by identifying the assumption necessary to make it work.

The necessary assumption for this argument to work is set out in (C): "The number of citations a paper receives is a measure of the importance of the research it reports." As explained in our explanations, if you negate this statement, the argument in the stimulus falls apart.

Answer choice (D) is irrelevant because it does not bridge the gap between the importance of a paper on the one hand and the number of times that paper is cited, on the other. This gap is the fundamental weakness of the argument set out in the stimulus, as explained above.

I hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any additional questions.