I have often found that to be true. From what I've heard, it is sometimes against the author's wishes, that they have to toss in equations to "make it look good" to get past review. At least in CS, you can read the source code if it's been published, and often it's a basic technique with a slight new twist that _maybe_ works but is super hard to reproduce. Also much of the papers are fluff lol, just random equations thrown in that are just copied from the textbook.