Word for Pretentiously Academic but Useless

I am looking for a word that incorporates all, or most, of the following (when referring to a sentence or a piece of technical literature):

• Highly academic


• Not useful (despite being technically correct)


• Overly verbose/eloquent


• Superfluous (to be honest, this seems to incorporate the rest, but I want to see if there is a better word here)

Sample sentence (I hear it's required):

There are many ____ white-paper definitions which only serve to dazzle the reader with the author's purported intelligence.

Answer

The two most common, apart from Lux's pretentious, are going to be

1. in the manner of a pedant, hence
   

   
   

   a. excessively concerned with minutiae.
   b. needlessly displaying academic learning.

   
   

   
   

and

1. 
   

   (originally) characterized by pomp and splendor.

   
   


2. 
   

   (now the primary sense) affectedly solemn and self-important.

   
   

You'd use the first if the important aspect was how unimportant the information being shared was, the later if you wanted to emphasize the (undeserved) self-importance with which it was being shared.

Since scholars have been writing for ages and this kind of behavior was, if anything, more common during the era when all scholars were monks, there are absolute scads of synonyms for variants and subvarieties. Some, like precious, could be considered gendered slurs; others, like bookish or nerdy, may not be taken as negative at all in our present culture. Two of my favorites are mumpsimus and sumpsimus.