In a recent review, one reviewer said we must rework the paper in light of two other papers. One paper was a highly valuable suggestion, and we've enthusiastically taken it on board. However, the second paper seems to be an ultra-specific paper (one example among thousands) and not applicable to our work.

I'm thinking of writing something like:

> 
> There are many methods for XYZ (and an anonymous reviewer of this paper seemed fond of QRST [26]), and a survey was given in [15]. In this paper, we take the approach ABC for our specific problem.
> 
> 
> 

(Here, I leave off "...since QRST does not actually apply to our problem".)

In this example, we (fairly politely) highlight that we're citing [26] at the reviewer's request. But I'm a bit worried it would be perceived as a passive-aggressive slight.

**Question**: Is it okay to mention we're citing an article only because a reviewer told us to?

I'm also considering two alternatives:

Alternative 1:

> 
> There are many methods for XYZ, such as QRST [26], LMNOP [4], and QRSTUV [5]; a survey is given in [15]. In this paper, we take the approach ABC.
> 
> 
> 

But this seems like I'm adding even more virtually irrelevant citations.

Alternative 2:

> 
> **Acknowledgment**  
> 
>  A helpful anonymous reviewer suggested citing [26].
> 
> 
> 

But while accurate, it might be considered provocative (and rude) and get the paper rejected.

This question is related to: [How to deal with an unreasonable reviewer asking to cite irrelevant articles?](https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/99745/8469) But in our case, the reviewer is not being unreasonable, maybe just fond of this particular paper. And it's just one additional citation that's being requested.

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*Update*: Thanks for everyone's help! To let you know what's going on (and maybe this will help someone who winds up in the same situation):

(*TL;DR*: The reviewer's suggested paper is related to an "in-between" paper which is related to our work; we feel it's not off-topic to cite it while discussing this in-between paper. It wasn't as off-topic as originally thought.)

1. We generally agreed with the advice in the answers (don't cite it). We also found the editor's email specifically said not to cite irrelevant papers suggested by reviewers. But we dug deeper to ensure we're not perceived as being dismissive. What happened next:
2. Upon more careful inspection, the reviewer described it as an "example". Eventually, we concluded that the reviewer was not giving us a list of papers to cite, but to generally say "look at papers like these".
3. This turned out to be a gold mine: it gave many papers which we could use to put our work into a broader context; none of our paper's predecessors do this. In fact, we found a paper which almost identically states the motivation for our paper, but in a broader context (which empowers our justification for working on this topic).
4. We looked into the suggested paper's references and papers citing that paper. We found another paper is a kind of "in-between" paper (related to both our paper, and the paper that was mentioned by the reviewer). We now discuss this in-between paper in detail, and explain how our method deviates from it. In the context of discussing this in-between paper, we feel it's not irrelevant to quickly cite the paper that was mentioned by the reviewer, without giving it undue weight.

(PS. In this particular instance, I feel this is not the reviewer's paper: other papers by the same authors (e.g. the in-between paper) are more natural to cite.)