I think the article is making a point through hyperbole. Citations have become a scoreboard on the back end. On the front end they've become more important th

I think the article is making a point through hyperbole. Citations have become a scoreboard on the back end. On the front end they've become more important than the content itself. A bad citation is viewed as some sort of academic crime. Bad content -- if actually judged -- is largely ignored. Perhaps I'm just scarred from my student days when I put a superscript at the end of the wrong sentence, which left the following sentence uncited gasp. A big deal was made of this that I was plagiarizing the material. They were also upset that I wasn't visibly concerned enough about this high crime and that I only viewed it as a typo. Seriously, I added the superscript one sentence early. There was never any feedback on the work itself.