> it's time that's not spent doing actual research Actual research includes keeping up to date with peers progress. If you were doing research but not regular

> it's time that's not spent doing actual research Actual research includes keeping up to date with peers progress. If you were doing research but not regularly reading new publications anyway, either you were working on a less-fundamental-research side of things, or, without even realising it, you were exploring directions already explored or losing time by not profiting from a new useful approach. It is just incorrect to say that the time used to read carefully a peer paper is taken over the time of doing research: if you were not peer-reviewing this paper, you maybe would have been reading carefully the same paper in order to keep up to date with your peers. In fact, one can lose its time peer-reviewing, but its their own fault: in general, you just need to target the review for articles that are useful for you to read anyway.