I wonder if there's a common author or two in those references that would serve to identify the anonymous reviewers.
If the original papers are niche enough, it's all but guaranteed..
i am unable to understand how that works; please help.
if these are indeed references to assertions made in their paper, how can they be irrelevant?
Pretty sure the request was "get more references" to a paper that needed none. So they added a bunch of stuff that doesn't do shit but gets the "number" bigger so the reviewers are happy with a "contribution" they made.
More likely it was "please cite these tangentially related papers from the same field but not actually related to this work, which were totally not written by me, your anonymous reviewer, (who was picked because of my activity in this research area), and I'm definitely not suggesting them to drive my citation count up, no siree."
Basically, the anonymous peer reviewers told the authors "you should cite these additional papers in your work". It's expected that any such recommendations would be relevant to the topic at hand, and therefore are worth bringing attention to, but the authors clearly do not agree that they have anything to do with their research.
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