"The soaring prices of scholarly and scientific journals have forced academic libraries used only by academic researchers to drastically reduce their list of subscriptions.
Some have suggested that in each academic discipline subscription decisions should be determined solely by a journal's usefulness in that discipline, measured by the frequency with which it is cited in published writings by researchers in the discipline."
The question stem points us to the suggestion and asks us to identify the answer choice that most seriously calls this suggestion into question. So this is a Weaken question.
The suggestion is that subscription decisions should be determined solely by a journal's usefulness in that discipline, with usefulness measured by the frequency with which it is cited in published writings by researchers in the discipline.
(D) states, "Researchers often will not cite a journal article that has influenced their work if they think that the journal in which it appears is not highly regarded by the leading researchers in the mainstream of the discipline."
This weakens the suggestion by taking issue with how usefulness is measured.
If researchers are not citing journal articles that have influenced their work if they think the journal in which the article appears is not highly regarded, using the frequency of citation would not be the best way to gauge usefulness, i.e. the journal articles referenced in (D) would not be cited frequently, even if they are frequently used by researchers.
So (D) would be the correct answer.
Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
