The scientific community discourages authors of research papers from citing papers that did not influence them. Such "rhetorical" citations are assumed to degrade the literature and incentives for good work. While a world where authors cite only substantively appears attractive, we argue that mandating substantive citing may have underappreciated consequences on the allocation of attention and dynamism in scientific literatures. We develop a novel agent-based model in which agents cite substantively and rhetorically. Agents first select papers to read based on their expected quality, read them and observe their actual quality, become influenced by those that are sufficiently good, and substantively cite them. Next, agents fill any remaining slots in the reference lists by (rhetorically) citing papers that support their narrative, regardless of whether they were actually influential. By turning rhetorical citing on-and-off, we find that rhetorical citing increases the correlation between quality and citations, increases citation churn, and reduces citation inequality. This occurs because rhetorical citing redistributes some citations from a stable set of elite-quality papers to a more dynamic set with high-to-moderate quality and high rhetorical value. Increasing the size of reference lists, often seen as an undesirable trend, amplifies the effects. In sum, rhetorical citing helps deconcentrate attention and makes it easier to displace incumbent ideas, so whether it is indeed undesirable depends on the metrics used to judge desirability.

翻译：科学界不鼓励研究论文作者引用未对其产生影响的工作。此类"修辞性引文"被认为会降低文献质量及优秀研究的激励。尽管要求作者仅进行实质性引用的世界看似理想，但我们认为强制实质性引用可能对科学文献中注意力分配与动态性产生未被充分认识的后果。我们构建了一个新型基于智能体的模型，其中智能体同时进行实质性引用与修辞性引用。智能体首先根据预期质量选择论文阅读，阅读后观察实际质量，受足够优质论文影响并对其进行实质性引用。随后，智能体通过（修辞性）引用支持其论述的论文来填补参考文献列表中的剩余位置，无论这些论文是否真正具有影响力。通过开关修辞性引用机制，我们发现修辞性引用能够提升质量与引用之间的相关性，增加引用更替率，并降低引用不平等。这是因为修辞性引用将部分引用从稳定的精英级论文集合重新分配给兼具中高质与高修辞价值的动态论文集合。参考文献列表规模的扩大（常被视为不良趋势）会强化这些效应。总之，修辞性引用有助于分散注意力并降低取代既有观点的难度，因此其是否确实不可取取决于用于衡量优劣的指标。