Sir

I read with surprise Steve Donovan's comment, in Correspondence, that it took him “less than an hour” to review a paper (“Reviewers not attached to online submission” Nature 434, 956; 200510.1038/434956b). I am not sure if this included typing up the referee's report, but this seems a very short time indeed when it may have taken the authors a year to write the paper in the first place.

I am no expert in palaeontology, and maybe the paper Donovan refereed was relatively easy to assess. But I often have the impression when receiving referees' reports on my work, both favourable and negative, that they were also compiled in “less than an hour”. I spend too long refereeing manuscripts — often a full week-end or more — and sometimes end up writing excessively long reports. But I need that much time to check the cited literature, perform calculations or try to interpret the data in a (generally) less fashionable way than the authors did.

Mistakes can be made by any referee, whether quick or slow, but in my experience the revised version of an article usually benefits from more thoughtful exchanges.

I agree with Donovan that we should not make the refereeing process unnecessarily difficult. But, as it is the only way to prevent false results or erroneous claims being published, we should not reduce it to a trivial act.