Comment by mturmon

I meant this more as a rueful acknowledgment of an academic truism - not all citations are read by those citing. But I have touched a nerve, so let me explain at least part of the nuance I see here.

In mathematics/applied math consider cited papers claimed to establish a certain result, but where that was not quite what was shown. Or, there is in effect no earthly way to verify that it does.

Or even: the community agrees it was shown there, but perhaps has lost intimate contact with the details — I’m thinking about things like Laplace’s CLT (published in French), or the original form of the Glivenko-Cantelli theorem (published in Italian). These citations happen a lot, and we should not pretend otherwise.

Here’s the example that crystallized that for me. “VC dimension” is a much-cited combinatorial concept/lemma. It’s typical for a very hard paper of Saharon Shelah (https://projecteuclid.org/journalArticle/Download?urlId=pjm%...) to be cited, along with an easier paper of Norbert Sauer. There are currently 800 citations of Shelah’s paper.

I read a monograph by noted mathematician David Pollard covering this work. Pollard, no stranger to doing the hard work, wrote (probably in an endnote) that Shelah’s paper was often cited, but he could not verify that it established the result at all. I was charmed by the candor.

This was the first acknowledgement I had seen that something was fishy with all those citations.

By this time, I had probably seen Shelah’s paper cited 50 times. Let’s just say that there is no way all 50 of those citing authors (now grown to 800) were working their way through a dense paper on transfinite cardinals to verify this had anything to do with VC dimension.

Of course, people were wanting to give credit. So their intentions were perhaps generous. But in no meaningful sense had they “read” this paper.

So I guess the short answer to your question is, citations serve more uses than telling readers to literally read the cited work, and by extension, should not always taken to mean that the cited work was indeed read.