Citation reflects both academic excellence and scholarly reputation. Generally, review articles fetch lot of citations. Higher number of citations reflect novel, significant and rigorous research works. Please view the attached figure which displays top 10 cited articles so far in history. Also check a related question in Researchgate.
In my opnion metrics are incomplete and only reflex partially some academic excellence and some scholarly reputation.
I normaly read all papers related to the topic in which I am working because I prefer to build my own opinion about the excellence of the work, the source and of the authors.