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Comment by throwaway12314 | Hacker News Reader

I worked as a research assistant for a bit over a year after the graduation and I had an experience that put me off. We submitted a paper and got some review feedback and one of them contained something like this

  ... this and that paper also worked on this research area and contain this and that stuff you can citate ...

The prof I was working with told me that this anonymous reviewer was probably the writer of those papers and asking for citation.

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Why did that put you off? This is a very common thing for reviewers to do. It is useful for you, because it makes you aware of other people who work in the same problem as you, leading to future job prospects, etc. But more importantly, it is useful for the readers of the article!

The alternative is several independent communities of researchers that work separately on the same problem, but do not acknowledge the existence of each other. Now, that would put you off!

It depends on context. Often reviewers are chosen because they work specifically in that area, and of course they know their work best. I've often done this as a reviewer in appropriate situations, where I point out closely related work that I've or others have done.

Of course, I've also seen EDITORS email me saying they would like me to cite some papers from their journal after I submitted my paper. That was definitely a turn off.

> The prof I was working with told me that this anonymous reviewer was probably the writer of those papers and asking for citation.

I think this is mostly just a kind of fun way of complaining about reviewers. Having been a reviewer for many computer science conference, I've often had the names of other reviewers visible to me. Most requests for citations are not for the reviewer's own work, and truly irrelevant citation requests seem to be pretty rare.

I do perceive journal/lab-centric fields to be worse about this, though.

well, if it's that transparent... I still wonder what to do with a handful of slightly off, but relatively good papers suggested to us. 2/5 would augment existing citations, 3/5 are related but not really relevant... No author is shared between them.

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