1. Search engines encourage us to write poorly? Do search engines favour results with long sentences and superlative words? I think not. In any case, to make this demonstration, the authors should repeat their survey with older papers, prior to the emergence of powerful academic search engines.

A much more likely phenomenon, in my opinion, is that when looking to quickly cite a reference, one seeks impressive-sounding papers. Most authors do not read the papers they cite. It might be preferable to measure influence instead of citations, as influence is more likely to be correlated with how well written the papers are (see Zhu et al, 2015, http://arxiv.org/abs/1501...).

2. I submit to the authors that they should have focused on highly cited papers and how they differ from the norm. Here are two arguments:

A. Citation counts have high statistical dispersion. It follows a power of law or something of the sort. Thus an increase of 5% in average citation counts could bear on very few papers. In effect, it may not mean what one intuitively thinks it means (each paper gets a 5% boost).

B. The counterpart is that most authors do not care about an increase of 5% of their citation counts. Going from 5 to 6 citations is not exciting. One wants to be cited about 100 times. Whether it is 80 times or 120 times is inconsequential.