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