In my grant-writing workshops, I ask a question: if the program officer and reviewers only read 4 pages of your 15-page proposal, which 4 do you want them to read? Most people say the aims page, the innovation paragraph. But the data says otherwise. Herbert et al. (2013) found grant reviewers spend, on average, only ~6.4 minutes per proposal. That is not enough time to read the abstract carefully, let alone weigh the significance against the feasibility section. So the real unit of grant review is not the proposal — it’s the impression. And the impression is set by the title, the abstract, the first sentence of the specific aims, and — surprisingly — the references. Yes, the references. Funders track citation patterns; a well-cited grant application signals that the applicant knows the field’s depth. But there is also a reproducibility angle: if you cite a key methodological paper you have never read, you risk building your power analysis on a quote you copied from another grant. That is how the ‘d = 0.5 from nowhere’ infection spreads across funded projects. My provocative question: if peer review is a 6-minute impression, should we stop pretending it is a deep scientific evaluation and instead design it explicitly as a fast, structured screening instrument?