> Citations aren’t intended as a goddamn endorsement (or metric). This. I may well write the equivalent of: "So, those clowns of [18] thought they could sneak

> Citations aren’t intended as a goddamn endorsement (or metric). This. I may well write the equivalent of: "So, those clowns of [18] thought they could sneak it past us to only model the near-trivial case which accounts for less than 5% of real-life occurrences (as per the distribution estimated in [5])." The second citation is barely-endorsing, and the first citation is an anti-endorsement. Or I could write: "A bunch of useless attempts have recently been published to achieve what I'm actually going to get right. [4, 7, 8]." Now, I wouldn't use this language, I'd be more polite and much more circumspect, but still, those are legit and not-entirely-uncommon citations.