[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> These citations serve to point the reader to the recent works mentioned in the sentence, which may not be readily accessible to someone who doesn't actively do research in that area but is otherwise knowledgeable about numerical computing.

CS papers typically have a "Related Work" section for this. I agree with the author that the Intorduction section should be used to introduce the work to a reader who will proably not read anything else.

Actually, to be honest, I hate structured writing and I hate that research papers are always written as if they were meant to be read by 5-year olds with ADHD, but I know that the way most people read most papers is to read the abstract, skim the Introduction, browse the graphs in the Experiments section and then check the Conclusions section to see if they missed anything. I'm guilty of that too. There are way too many papers and too little time to read them all carefully. So papers end up written to be skimmed rather than read.