> I've also seen that during peer review a reviewer may give a list of publications they 'suggest' for the literature review, sometimes completely unrelated fie

> I've also seen that during peer review a reviewer may give a list of publications they 'suggest' for the literature review, sometimes completely unrelated fields. If you choose not to, you will likely see your paper rejected. You are severely misrepresenting how things work here. A reviewer doesn't accept or reject a paper. A reviewer gives their response to an editor and the editor makes a decision. The editor knows who the reviewer is, and has access to the reviews and the author's response to them. If the editor sees the reviewer has suggested adding bunch of references to their own work, and has suggested rejecting the paper after the authors refuse this then the editor is going to know what is going on. They aren't completely stupid. > purposefully leak your own paper to get past the publisher pay wall Many papers in maths, physics and computer science appear on arXiv before being submitted for publication. In the fields I have worked in you can replace the "most" with "pretty much all".