On a wider topic of citation. When writing papers I always attempted to cite only those papers that: a) correctly, and in their entirety, support my own findings; b) point out the most relevant and useful studies to the reader; and c) acknowledge only relevant sources of ideas and techniques. On the other side of the fence, when refereeing a paper I always read a number of the article’s references to help set the scene for what I was being asked to assess. However, many papers seem to have a never ending list of references, making this very much a pick and mix process. I appreciate that it is important to correctly cite the literature, but there appears to be a growing tendency for researchers to go slightly over board on the number of references they include in a paper, which raises the questions:

1) Have they really read them all?
2) Are they second-hand citing?
3) Are they citing papers for which they have only read the abstracts?
4) Are they citing their own or colleagues work?
5) Are they trying to deliberately muddy the waters?