The nature of citations are often much more ambiguous, though, and assigning sentiment will often be unhelpful.
Background citations are often of the flavor of: "These guys did almost exactly the same thing as us, but due to the minor detail of wanting to get our own work published, we think their work is inferior."
Or, "This cited work had a great idea, but due to rush to publish they left out a bunch of details and took a few short cuts on the implementation. We've fixed some of these holes, and called the original authors dolts to elevate the importance of our own incremental improvements."
This is correct, however, it does not eliminate the value of citation polarity; citation polarity must be seen relative to the rhetorical zone type in which it occurs: the parent's examples are valid, but typically limited to zone type BACKGROUND ( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/thesis/t.pdf ), where the related work is described, and often differentiated from one's own work.
Yah.... I think this kind of semantic ambiguity and complexity points to 90% of the information content of the citation being the existence of the citation. After all, I wouldn't bother calling someone a dolt if their paper was actually insignificant.
Background citations are often of the flavor of: "These guys did almost exactly the same thing as us, but due to the minor detail of wanting to get our own work published, we think their work is inferior."
Or, "This cited work had a great idea, but due to rush to publish they left out a bunch of details and took a few short cuts on the implementation. We've fixed some of these holes, and called the original authors dolts to elevate the importance of our own incremental improvements."