Peer reviewers are having an important role in current scholarly communications who are in the best position to pick incorrect or irrelevant references and suggest amendments. They should recheck the relevance and correctness of the reference lists, advise ethically sound additional references (preferably not auto-citations), or suggest shortening the lists by omitting redundant and retracted sources. Adding references is particularly required when the authors' statements are neither their own words of wisdom nor general knowledge.

Regards,

Much of the answer has already been given.

I would add that the reviewers are often selected by the editor from among young graduates, who do not have sufficient experience in the discipline.

Hence the many misunderstandings.

Peer review is designed to assess the validity, quality and often the originality of articles for publication and are supposed to be the ones who have good command over the chosen domain. So, they do have a fair bit of idea about the earlier works in the field. If parentheses are used then automatically it is cross-checked by the plagiarism software too. However, there are areas of concern if they do not have sufficient experience in the discipline.