Reviewer recommending citation of certain papers of specific group of authors may be himself Recently I had a challenge in responding to a reviewer (#2) for revising our work. The reviewer asked us to refer 16 papers in multiple parts of the paper. I decided to refer some of these references about 8 papers due to the not relevancy of the mentioned references from the reviewer to the question raised by the reviewer #2.

Now the reviewers commented on the revised version and three of them are accepted without any further comments and modification. But the reviewer #2 rejected the paper and said that the authors didn't consider my concerns and comments thoroughly and only partially answered to them.

I think that this reviewer objects to our work because of we didn't refer to all of 16 mentioned paper in his comments.

The editor asked from us to answer why we didn't answer the reviewer #2 comments and revise our work to answer them.

I have two scenarios in my mind:


State clearly the unprofessional work of the reviewer #2 to forcing us to mention many papers from a group of specific people with a similar author in all of them and weak relevance of the mentioned works to that comment.
Reanswer the comments of reviewer #2 and mention some of the wanted references


what should I do now?
Neither, you should just write an answer (not change the article) in which you mention for each paper why you did not cite it. Keep it objective, calm, and short. If the reviewer is unprofessional then that will become clear enough, and your professionalism will be all the more obvious.