Who reviewed this paper? A few days ago @gcabanac tweeted about a paper that had published a remark that it had been forced to cite irrelevant papers. You can see the tweet here: buff.ly/3UMIguf. We remarked that if it was not so serious, it would be funny. Since reading that tweet, we have not been able to get it out of our head, so we thught that we would document it in a little more detail. We are doing this for three reasons. 1️⃣ In our view, it descerves more detail to be made available. 2️⃣ We'd like these details to be be kept as a matter of public record, so we are posting similar posts on our X account and our LinkedIn account. 3️⃣ It should be of interest to this community, so we hope that this raises even further the ethical issues around this topic. The first image shows the paper that we are looking at. What is interesting is the text that appears on at the end of the introduction (highlighted in red). This appears to show that the reviewer insisted that a set of 13 papers be cited, else they would not accept the paper. It would be interesting to see the review repport, so that we could be certain what had been said. If you want to see the paper, it is available here: buff.ly/4fndXm0 In the rest of this 🧵, we show the papers that have been asked to be cited (i.e. [35]-[47]). These have been taken from the paper mentioned above. You'll notice (as we have highlighted it) that every paper is "et al." meaning, of course, that there are quite a few authors on each paper. Gicven that we cannot see all the authors, the other images on this 🧵 shows the full set of authors on each of these 13 papers. We leave it an an exercise for the reader to hazard a guess as to the reviewr is?