A typical paper doesn’t just contain factual claims about standard questions, but also theoretical discussion and a point of view on the ideas that form the fabric of a field. Papers are often referenced to clarify the meaning of a theoretical discussion, or to give credit for inspiring the direction in which the discussion moves. This aspect doesn’t significantly depend on truth of findings of particular studies, because an interesting concept motivates many studies that both experimentally investigate and theoretically discuss it. Some of the studies will be factually bogus, but the theoretical discussion in them might still be relevant to the concept, and useful for subsequent good studies.
So a classification of citations into positive and negative ignores this important third category, something like conceptual reference citation.
A typical paper doesn’t just contain factual claims about standard questions, but also theoretical discussion and a point of view on the ideas that form the fabric of a field. Papers are often referenced to clarify the meaning of a theoretical discussion, or to give credit for inspiring the direction in which the discussion moves. This aspect doesn’t significantly depend on truth of findings of particular studies, because an interesting concept motivates many studies that both experimentally investigate and theoretically discuss it. Some of the studies will be factually bogus, but the theoretical discussion in them might still be relevant to the concept, and useful for subsequent good studies.
So a classification of citations into positive and negative ignores this important third category, something like conceptual reference citation.