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I don't know. I can understand that as a reviewer, if you see work that relates closely to your own prior work, you would be inclined to point the authors to th

• scythe 4y ago
  When I worked for MDPI (please lower your pitchforks), we had a guideline, IIRC, that the reviewers of a paper were supposed to not be collaborators with each other, in addition to the usual requirement that they not be collaborators with the authors. ("Collaborators" meant coauthorship within five years ago). In principle, this means that if a citation was necessary and you were an author on it, you could hope that your co-reviewer(s) would recommend it. In practice, reviewers did sometimes request citations of their own works. As an editor you could reject the whole review report, but you were on deadlines and quotas and you typically had a hard enough time finding reviewers anyway. In my experience, most of the practices that researchers gripe about in MDPI are results of onerous working conditions rather than any kind of laxity in the culture; everyone was regularly encouraged to be serious about scientific integrity and seek out the best reviewers, and practically all of the people I worked with were quite intelligent and concerned about doing a good job, but it was also an unspoken expectation to work after hours, Saturdays, to always be sending an email, etc; exhausted people make mistakes.