Since you indicated original post was sarcasm.
Back in the day when I was in academia I watched the references slowly increasing from a few- maybe 10-15- into the hundreds. Didn't always mean the info was good, but just that there were a lot of references.
I thought you might have been referring to such things. In fact, some articles came to a conclusion that was exactly opposite from what their data supported. Oh well, days of yore.
Yeah, I saw that when I did research in the 90's at school.
The other hilarious thing was the titles used on theses. Some would seem to go on and on and on and on.
We used to joke about it, my wife and I still sometimes. At then end of someone's sentence add something like
"In a rural pond in Northwestern Idaho"
Geno