[jl2718]

Is there a reasonable case to be made for excluding citations entirely? They seem frivolous and arbitrary, and most of the genuine ones are discovered by search, so maybe we could publish without citations, and let the search be automated. The more useful element of a paper is the unique claims that it makes, and these probably should be denoted explicitly.

[alpinisme]

One large motivation for looking at citations is as a proxy for the importance or value of your claims. More productive research claims will beget more productive research, whereas trivial or dead end or uninteresting claims will just float off into the archival void. So if you want to exclude citations you need another way to measure importance quickly and impersonally across entire fields in more or less real time.