How so? Could you clarify your reasoning?
My thinking is: Given that a scientist has read (or looked at) a paper, they're more likely to cite it if it's correct and useful than if it's incorrect. (I'm assuming that affirmative citations are more common than "X & Y said Z but they're wrong because..." citations.) If that were all that happened, then the number of citations a paper gets would be strongly correlated with its correctness, and we would expect it to be rare for a bad paper to get a lot of citations. However, if we take into account the fact that citations are also used by other scientists as a reading list, then a paper that has already been cited a lot will be read by a lot of people, of whom some will cite it.
So when a paper is published, there are two forces affecting the number of citations it gets. First, the "badness effect" ("This paper sounds iffy, so I won't cite it") pushes down the number of citations. Second, the "popularity effect" (a lot of people have read the paper, so a lot of people are potential citers) pushes up the number of citations. The magnitude of the popularity effect depends mostly on what happens soon after publication, when readership is small and thus more subject to random variation. Of course, for blatantly erroneous papers the badness effect will still predominate, but in marginal cases (like the aphasia example) the popularity effect can swamp the badness effect. Hence we would expect to see more bad papers getting widely cited; the more obviously bad they are, the stronger this suggests the popularity effect is.
I suppose one could create a computer simulation if one were interested; I would predict results similar to Simkin & Roychowdhury's.
I see: in the case that a paper is read, deciding a paper sounds iffy and deciding not to cite it would correlate strongly with deciding not to cite a paper with wrong conclusions.
I was considering that scientists rarely check the conclusions of the papers they cite by reading them, but just decide based on writing and other signals whether the source is credible. So a well-written paper with a wrong conclusion could get continued citations. But indeed, if the paper is written carefully and the methodology convincing, it would be less likely that the conclusion is wrong.
We're all familiar with false popular memes that spread faster than they can be stomped out: You only use 10% of your brain. Al Gore said he invented the internet. Perhaps it doesn't surprise you that some memes in popular culture can't be killed. But does the same thing happen in science?
Most of you have probably heard of Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia. Every textbook and every college course on language and the brain describes the connection between damage to these areas, and the speech deficits named after them.
Also, both are probably wrong. Both areas were mistakenly associated with their aphasias because they are near or surrounded by other areas which, when damaged, cause the aphasias. Yet our schools continue teaching the traditional, erroneous story; including a lecture in 9.14 at MIT given in 2005. Both the Wikipedia entry on Wernicke's aphasia and the Wikipedia entry on Broca's aphasia are still in error; the Wikipedia entry on Wernicke's area has got it straight.
Is it because this information is considered unimportant? Hardly; it's probably the only functional association you will find in every course and every book on the brain.
Is it because the information is too new to have penetrated the field? No; see the dates on the references below.
In spite of this failure in education, are the experts thoroughly familiar with this information? Possibly not; this 2006 paper on Broca's area by a renowned expert does not mention it. (In its defense, it references many other studies in which damage to Broca's area is associated with language deficits.)
So:
References
Bogen JE, Bogen GM (1976). Wernicke's region—Where is it? Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 280: 834–43.
Dronkers, N. F., Shapiro, J. K., Redfern, B., & Knight, R. T. (1992). The role of Broca’s area in Broca’s aphasia.
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 14, 52–53.
Dronkers NF., Redfern B B., Knight R T. (2000). The neural architecture of language disorders. in Bizzi, Emilio; Gazzaniga, Michael S.. The New cognitive neurosciences (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. pp. 949–58.
Dronkers et al. (2004). Lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in language comprehension. Cognition 92: 145-177.
Mohr, J. P. (1976). Broca’s area and Broca’s aphasia. In H. Whitaker, Studies in neurolinguistics, New York: Academic Press.