citations - Is it acceptable to include a paper in the reference list but not cite it in text?

A paper (quite) related to some work my coauthors and I have recently appeared as a preprint. This paper cites ours; however, it does not do so in the body of the paper (intro, proofs, etc.), but only in the references: with the LaTeX command \nocite, I assume.

Doing so seems strange to me, as it does not discuss relevance, nor compare, nor even state what the cited paper does. It's a citation without context.

Am I overreacting? More importantly, am I wrong: are there situations where this type of citation makes sense, and, if so, which ones?

Edit: by "makes sense," I mean "is justified for academic-related/citation etiquette reasons."

Answer

There are lots of situations where this type of citation naturally emerges:

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  You want to cite a paper that you have gotten inspiration from, but you cannot pinpoint any specific objective relation between that paper and yours. For example, some equalities appearing in that paper look similar to some equalities in yours (even though they involve completely different objects), and you have built some parallels in your mind without ever making them rigorous. You may try to be open and mention these parallels in your paper, but they will be so vague and subjective that readers will tap their foreheads and referees will ask you to remove the sentences.

  
  


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  You have cited a paper whose results you used in one of your proofs, but then you find a better/simpler proof and no longer had any use for the citation. But you never bothered to remove the citation, since you might well need it again for something different. It's much easier to keep it in and only remove it at the very end of the process, when the paper is about to get published.

  
  


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  You have written a long paper and then split it into two. Each of them still has the full bibliography of the original paper, because removing references is thankless and boring work and you may need them again (see the previous point).

  
  



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  You have pre-emptively added the citation to the bibliography since you know you will want to cite it in a forthcoming section of your paper. That section never gets written.