james.h.meyers Wrote:
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.