Existence of the Westβcorrection

We study the smearing effects, due to the nucleon's Fermi motion inside the deuteron, in a covariant way by using the Brodsky parametrization method and neglecting the spin of the particles involved. We find that West's $\beta$ correction is absent in the high-energy limit for hadronic scattering, but it is still there for leptonic scattering in the deep-inelastic limit. The form of the correction for the leptonic case is, however, different in our calculations from that given by West. We show explicitly that our approach is consistent and avoid some of the approximations made in the earlier contribution to this problem.