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.
Which one of the following, if true, most seriously calls into question the suggestion described above?
(A) The nonacademic readership of a scholarly or scientific journal can be accurately gauged by the number of times articles appearing in it are cited in daily newspapers and popular magazines.
(B) The average length of a journal article in some sciences, such as physics, is less than half the average length of a journal article in some other academic disciplines, such as history.
(C) The increasingly expensive scholarly journals are less and less likely to be available to the general public from nonacademic public libraries.
(D) 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.
(E) In some academic disciplines, controversies which begin in the pages of one journal spill over into articles in other journals that are widely read by researchers in the discipline.