Well, the problem in this case isn't really in the scientific or peer review process itself, it's in using citation count as a metric for paper quality or resea

Well, the problem in this case isn't really in the scientific or peer review process itself, it's in using citation count as a metric for paper quality or researcher expertise. I've had people play this game on several of my papers under review. Reviews will say something like "high quality submission but the authors should consider including work X for completeness" etc where it's obvious that work X was written by the reviewer. As an author, I just found some place to plausibly cite the work and moved on. The quality or validity of my manuscript was not impacted in any way. In my admittedly limited experience, reviewers will rarely green light obviously inferior work just to get an additional citation as it impacts their reputation and it's an inefficient way to stat pad (self-citation or trading citations with your collaborators is by far the most efficient way to pump citation count, especially in the context of review papers). Additionally, obviously inferior works don't even make it to the peer review process; they are rejected by the journal editors in a first pass screen. There are more insidious games people play that DO impact publication quality, such as requesting friendly reviewers (this mechanism is normally legitimately used to help editors route manuscripts for review to domain experts), submitting work to journals where the PI is an editor / has relationships with editors, attaching well known PIs to manuscripts to add the appearance of legitimacy even though they did no work and were not involved at all, etc. These are problems that won't go away because there are far too many researchers and not enough money / positions to go around, so people are heavily incentivized to play games.