Doesn't surprise me that it's hard to nail down a real correlation. Review scores are going to be biased towards games preferred by people who frequent review sites, lowering the scores of games like The Sims and Wii Sports. Advertising can certainly have a tremendous effect, as can the release of other games at around the same time.
I'd say that the topmost study is rather flawed in that it only looks for one-way correlation - it checks to see if the top-selling games also had good reviews. Let's ignore for the moment the fact that an average of 87.5 doesn't really imply consistently high ratings in this industry (where an 80 is a 'pass' for most gamers). Plenty of highly rated games just didn't sell that well. Look at Okami or Psychonauts.
Of course the games that sell the best are highly rated. They're almost always incredibly well-hyped, being either flagship games like Gears of War to which the hopes of a system are pinned or returning blockbusters like Halo and Zelda. As such, they enjoy massive budgets and the best talent in the industry, and they benefit from whatever pressure there is for reviewers to be positive about games that they know will sell millions.
The best games are going to be highly rated, but everything else is going to be a wash. Far more important than quality are timing, advertising, and franchise.
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