Academic papers have to cite related research to situate their contribution, even if they're not directly building on that research. When researchers can't reproduce a paper's results, they have to cite that paper when reporting that, or no one will know what they're talking about and the bad paper cannot be refuted. The whole system also needs many compare and contrast citations that aren't built on directly or at all, so you know what a paper is doing and not doing.
Yea, I hadn't really considered those kinds of citations. I was thinking of the piles of worthless citations that authors often put in simply because they're supposed to cite every fact, even if it's something that's common sense which they're not treating critically and doesn't affect their own work so they just did a quick search for any paper that made that claim.
