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The citation graph is only meta-data. I use the ‘citation graph’ (searching references and backward references) all the time for my own scientific research, in the sense that I see what and why people referenced something else and see if it is relevant, but it is secondary to the content. The citation graph is not too valuable unless you also have the context and reason for the citation, or the content (at least the title and abstract) of the cited source. I use citation searches for discovering possible leads that slipped through keyword searches and the like. for a new area I’m working in, i’d guess that if I see a new paper, at least half the works cited are always not relevant to whatever question I have and i can tell from the context or the title (neither are part of the citation graph); another 1/4 -1/3 are famous papers that I already know. Of the rest, less than half are things I would add to my own work–and this is often just confirmation that a paper I saw somewhere else is judged as relevant broadly. Where the citation graph appears to mostly comes into play is allotting credit for work, computing influence factors and H-factors.
By analogy, the link graph of wikipedia is completely open, but certainly an order of magnitude less important that the wikipedia content. Page-rank used the citation graph of webpages as the core, for ranking relevance among pages that match keywords. Note that the content is the first primary relevance; the citation graph helps find the most relevant within that set. The citation graph is only useful if you have the content and context; if you have that, you already have the citation graph (i.e., the references section).
