While they'll all get swept up in meta-analyses, systematic reviews, etc. a huge portion of a paper's citation count can come from narrative sections, where tha

While they'll all get swept up in meta-analyses, systematic reviews, etc. a huge portion of a paper's citation count can come from narrative sections, where that first paper will reap a lot of citations in "First describe by...", "As established in..." etc. The Nobel Prize goes to the people who discovered something. Not the people who confirmed that they were right.