Abstract It is shown that the overall energy conservation kinematic effect plays an important role in explaining the Bjorken scaling violations in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering, at least in the low-to-moderate Q 2 and 2 Mν region. Based on this, we prove that approximately the “proper scaling variable” should be the Bloom-Gilman or Weizmann variable, not the Bjorken or Nachtmann variable. We also present some discussion on the results and their relations to QCD.