Something I think of a lot:

How commonly thoughtful & nuanced scholarship is recruited into blunt arguments that can be distilled into catchy phrasing. How the specificity & context of the work is not appreciated or engaged, yet is cited.

I've seen this a lot with work on housing + racial segregation. Quantitative measures of racial & ethnic segregation become shorthands for injustice, absolving the writer from the burden of actually engaging policies & their socio-spatial consequences.

And then, what happens is this: these misreadings of the texts that are cited in a given area/topic become the basis of critiques of the texts themselves. It's a meta-critique that perpetuates the cursory/non-substantive citational politics of others within the discipline.

(Not gonna offer specifics, y'all. This is grad seminar-worthy, maybe.)

Basically, it's becoming clearer to me that reading is not a prerequisite for citation, and that has ripple effects on how we conceptualize complex social phenomena.