>  the new guidelines would reduce a reviewer's time to less than 5 hrs,
maybe only 3!

That's ridiculous for a good review.  A good reviewer will double check
every citation to see whether or not it actually supports the claim made by
the authors.  I'm often familiar with the citations, and sometimes recall
them as not supporting the made claim, so need to reread them to confirm.

In a recent paper, in which at least half a dozen citations did not support
the claims that the authors made, I then needed to read the citations in
the cited papers.  This took hours.  And then, since my conclusion was that
the author's interpretations were not supported by either citations nor
their own research, the editor then asked me to write a separate review to
present it delicately to the authors.

All the above take hours of unpaid time.  Worth it for scientific progress,
but I don't know how to shortcut it.
-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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