The scientific community generally discourages authors of research papers from citing papers that did not influence them because such "rhetorical" citations are assumed to degrade the literature and incentives for good work. Intuitively, a world where authors cite only substantively appears attractive. We argue that manding substantive citing may have underappreciated consequences on the allocation of attention and dynamism. 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 with papers that support their claims, 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：科学界普遍不鼓励研究论文作者引用未对其产生影响的文献，因为这类"修辞性"引用被认为会降低文献质量和优秀工作的激励。直观上，作者仅引用实质性影响文献的世界颇具吸引力。我们论证强制实质性引用可能对注意力分配和学术动态性产生未充分认知的影响。我们开发了一种新型基于主体的模型，其中主体同时进行实质性引用和修辞性引用。主体首先根据预期质量选择待读论文，阅读后观察实际质量，被足够优秀的论文所影响并进行实质性引用，随后在参考文献列表中剩余位置填入支持其论点的论文（无论是否实际受其影响）。通过开启/关闭修辞性引用功能，我们发现修辞性引用能提升质量与引用之间的相关性、增加引用流动率并降低引用不平等性。这种效应源于修辞性引用将部分引用从稳定的精英质量论文集重新分配至更动态的具有高至中等质量和高修辞价值的论文集。参考文献列表规模的扩大（这一常被视为不良趋势的现象）会强化上述效应。总之，修辞性引用有助于分散注意力并降低更新主导观点的难度，因此其是否确实不可取取决于评判标准的选择。