When a Reviewer Asks You to Cite Their Own Papers.

A reviewer asking you to cite their own papers is not automatically misconduct. The request is legitimate when the papers fill a real gap in your argument, and coercive when they are pushed on you regardless of relevance. Judge each suggested reference on whether it supports a specific claim in your manuscript. Add the ones that do, decline the ones that do not with a one-line reason, and take the request to the editor in confidence if your acceptance appears to hinge on obeying.

Self-citation by reviewers is common, and often useful. A reviewer was picked because they work in your area, so their own papers are frequently the closest evidence to what you are claiming. The trouble starts when the citation serves the reviewer's metrics instead of your paper.

Is a reviewer allowed to ask you to cite their own papers?

Yes, as long as the suggestion improves the paper. The Committee on Publication Ethics, whose guidelines most journals follow, tells peer reviewers to recommend their own work only where it is needed to substantively improve the manuscript, and not to "suggest that authors include citations to the reviewer's work merely to increase the reviewer's citation count."

A reviewer who points to two of their papers that report the method you skipped over is doing the job. So is one who notes that your literature review misses a debate they happen to have contributed to. The line is not who wrote the paper. It is whether the paper belongs in yours.

How do I know if a citation request is coercive?

Run a relevance test on each suggested reference. If the reviewer named the specific claim the citation would support, treat it as a suggestion. If they handed you a list of their own papers with no argument for any of them, and none of your claims were actually short of support, you are closer to coercion.

The clearest version of this test comes from Allen Wilhite and Eric Fong, whose 2012 study in Science defined a request as coercive when it did three things: it gave no indication that the manuscript was actually deficient in attribution, it did not point to particular articles or bodies of work, and it did not direct the author toward relevant work in other journals. Turn that into three questions. Did they say what is missing? Did they explain why these specific papers fix it? Would they be satisfied by a citation to someone else's work that closed the same gap? A fair suggestion survives all three. Coercion fails them.

Why does coercive citation happen?

It happens because citations are currency. A reviewer's citation count feeds their standing, and a journal's aggregate counts feed its impact factor, so both have a quiet incentive to see more references to their own corner of the field.

Wilhite and Fong found the pressure is not applied at random. Coercive requests landed more often on junior authors, the assistant and associate professors under the most pressure to publish, and on papers with few authors, where fewer people were around to object. In the same survey, 86 percent of researchers called the practice inappropriate, yet 57 percent said they would add superfluous citations before submitting to a journal known to coerce. That gap tells you the request in front of you is a familiar move, not a personal test.

How do I decline the citations without starting a fight?

Accept the references that pass the relevance test, then decline the rest in your response letter with a neutral, specific reason. You do not need to accuse anyone. You need to show the editor you considered each one.

The same discipline that governs any pushback applies here, so it helps to read this alongside the wider case for disagreeing with a reviewer politely and to slot your reasons into a clean point-by-point response format. A line that works: "We have added Chen et al. (2021) in Section 2, which supports our choice of estimator. We reviewed the other suggested references and could not identify a claim in the manuscript that they directly support, so we have not included them." That reads as judgment, not defiance.

Keep in mind that every citation you do add has to earn its place. The Waraq rule library flags the inverse problem under substance.evidence.citation, titled "Unsupported claim": "Strong claims should carry a citation." A citation with no claim beneath it is the mirror image, padding that a future editor will read as filler. If you keep a reference, make sure a sentence in your paper actually leans on it, and format it to the journal's house style, whether that is numbered Vancouver or author-date APA. A tool like Waraq will surface a claim that stands without support, which is exactly the sentence a borrowed citation should be attached to, if it is attached to anything.

Should I tell the editor about a coercive citation request?

Yes, when the request looks coercive rather than helpful, and you can raise it privately. Most submission systems let you send the editor a confidential comment that the reviewer never sees, separate from the response letter you write back to the reviewer.

Keep the note factual. Quote the request, say which references you judged relevant and which you did not, and ask the editor whether they want the remaining citations added. You are not filing a complaint. You are handing the editor a decision that is theirs to make. Editors field these often, and COPE expects them to step in when a reviewer pushes citations for their own benefit. Framing it as a question protects you and puts the judgment where it belongs.

What if my acceptance seems to depend on complying?

Put it in writing to the editor before you comply. A quiet decision to pad your references buys one acceptance and leaves a permanent record of citations that do not hold up.

Write to the editor directly and describe what you were asked, without adjectives: "The review conditions acceptance on adding six references, all to the reviewer's own work, and does not tie them to specific claims in our manuscript. We are glad to add any the editor judges relevant." That sentence does two things. It tells the editor a line may have been crossed, and it keeps you on the record as reasonable. If the demand survives that, and the editor backs it, you have learned something real about the journal before your name is on a paper it published. Structuring the exchange as a plain response to reviewers letter, with the confidential note running alongside it, keeps the two conversations from bleeding into each other.