> that means thousands of people read them? It doesn't, but that's counter-intuitive. With relatively new, relatively small citation counts, the numbers are p

> that means thousands of people read them? It doesn't, but that's counter-intuitive. With relatively new, relatively small citation counts, the numbers are probably indicative of the number of actual readers. But well established, high citation number papers often take on a "shorthand" role. You'll often see them in introductory sections or other supporting text with statements like "previous authors have X", "common approaches such as Y", etc. Here they often have little to do with the core of the paper, they are providing context. Now really people should have read them, but sometimes Jones, et. al. 1998 just becomes a collective shorthand for a set of ideas. As such people will quote it just because the papers they did read quoted it, etc. Often, over time, a single paper becomes the landmark for a set of ideas, and just gets cited to pull those in by reference. In theory this is the paper that "invented" those ideas, but in reality it's more complicated. Overall it's not a terrible practice, as a way to frame things, but can be error prone.