Fifty papers have been written about the Hořava-Lifshitz gravity (NYU about it). Aside from the first author - Petr Hořava - and the most recent group of authors, everyone in this list seems to have gotten carried away...So Motl seems to be implying that, outside of a few important papers like the one from Hořava, some scientists published papers largely to catch a bandwagon wave that was sure to bring lots of citations, even if the work was not high quality.
They knew that someone would refer to them, whatever they write, so they often (incorrectly) connected the new bandwagon to their older work and/or offered solutions that would only be interesting if the theory actually worked...
I'm not going to speculate whether or not this is true. However, it raises an interesting question: Do scientists sometimes publish papers because it is a good opportunity to generate citations, even if the quality of the paper is not that great?
I guess even scientists are human. That said, I'm not sure it is the ethical thing to do.
