When refereeing a paper, stating I am not an author of suggested literature When getting reports for papers submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, referees sometimes suggest that some missing items be added to the list of references. In my short career I have seen all possible cases, from honest additions that were clearly necessary, through border-line literature where one could cite any one of a long list of possible sources, to blatant cases of citation shopping where the reviewers ask for 10 of their own papers to be added to the list.

Here, I am looking at the problem from the other side (the reviewer side). I recently refereed a paper for which I suggested that the authors look at a very recent paper, authored by researchers totally unrelated to me, that touches on a couple of issues that I thought were very relevant. Since that paper is so new, it is likely that they were not aware of its existence. Because of all the misbehavior I talked about in my first paragraph above, I am afraid that the authors of the paper I reviewed might assume I am one of the authors of the suggested paper.

I know I should never disclose my identity in a report, but what about stating who "I am not"? Something like this:


  I think the authors should have a look at recent paper Nice New Paper, which might help with the interpretation of their results. This reviewer would like to add that he did not participate in said study.


In my opinion this would serve two purposes. 1) Clarify the legitimacy of my suggestion (I do not get anything from it) and 2) prevent the authors of the reviewed paper from suspecting it was the other guys who reviewed their paper and they are shopping for citations.

What are possible ethical considerations against this course of action from the points of view of editors and authors?
As a reviewer, I have suggested the authors to cite one of my papers only once or twice. I apologized for doing that in the notes to the editor, and remarked that I couldn't avoid it because it was really central. I wrote nothing in the blind notes to the authors, and I write nothing when I suggest papers from other people.

I do this because of two reasons:


I value anonymity of peer reviewers highly, and I prefer to avoid remarks that reduce it by unnecessarily providing additional bits of information. There are already unavoidable signs such as writing style and English mistakes, and I don't want to add more.
I believe it is the editor's responsibility to make sure that the referees are not citation-shopping. It can't be anyone else's, because they are the only person with all the information necessary to perform a check. So I have to justify my actions to him/her, not to the authors.


If, as an author or as a second reviewer, I noticed a very blatant case of citation shopping, I would consider it appropriate to write to the editor privately to suggest investigating. but this has never happened to me up to now. (Although there have been a couple of borderline cases.)