Sure things like these exist in academia, but you will rarely find a paper that only exists for the sake of promoting others, or otherwise extremely useless one

Sure things like these exist in academia, but you will rarely find a paper that only exists for the sake of promoting others, or otherwise extremely useless ones for that sake. For an unintentionally humorous counterexample consider Tai's paper, which has around 100 quotations. ;-) http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract