Delirium
The sort of paper that buries its reader in gratuitous and only-tangentially-relevant equations and data tables as a substitute for actually making a good argument is sadly altogether too common. Most do get caught by peer review (at least in good publications and conferences), but there are still a fair number that slip through...
Bad papers get published - no surprise there. It would be a surprise if they rose high up the citation statistics. The comparison with political rhetoric breaks down right there, doesn't it? Simplistic political stuff generally gets far more attention than carefully-crafted leaders and columns in the quality press.
But regardless, *we* don't want to do that. A few of the articles that get too citation-happy do seem to do this sometimes... when every single sentence ends with an external link (half of them broken, since the web is mostly ephemeral), and the writing style is "a bunch of gratuitous facts are asserted with no coherent explanation", something is wrong...
Could be the people who use 'quote your sources' as a way to win arguments, rather than improve the encyclopedia?
Charles