The soaring prices of scholarly and scientific journals have forced academic libraries used only by academic researchers to drastically reduce their list of subscriptions.
Conclusion
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.
Evidence
The soaring prices of scholarly and scientific journals have forced academic libraries to drastically reduce their list of subscriptions.
Evaluate
This argument is based on a Plan/Recommendation pattern. The goal is to create a useful selection of journals for each discipline, while the plan is to use citation frequency as the measure of a journal’s usefulness.
Let's consider potential weaknesses of this approach:
1. Could there be instances where citation frequency does not accurately reflect a journal's usefulness to researchers? For example, influential work might not be frequently cited due to outside factors, such as lack of familiarity with certain journals or researchers’ biases.
2. Could relying on citation frequency inadvertently exclude valuable journals that should be part of the subscriptions for other reasons?
Goal
Look for an answer that shows how using citation frequency might not be an effective or fully reliable measure of a journal’s usefulness, or that suggests an alternate measure that could more accurately reflect usefulness.