Pretty sure the request was “get more references” to a paper that needed none. So they added a bunch of stuff that doesn’t do shit but gets the “number” bigger so the reviewers are happy with a “contribution” they made.
More likely it was “please cite these tangentially related papers from the same field but not actually related to this work, which were totally not written by me, your anonymous reviewer, (who was picked because of my activity in this research area), and I’m definitely not suggesting them to drive my citation count up, no siree.”
Pretty sure the request was “get more references” to a paper that needed none. So they added a bunch of stuff that doesn’t do shit but gets the “number” bigger so the reviewers are happy with a “contribution” they made.
More likely it was “please cite these tangentially related papers from the same field but not actually related to this work, which were totally not written by me, your anonymous reviewer, (who was picked because of my activity in this research area), and I’m definitely not suggesting them to drive my citation count up, no siree.”