It's certainly true that it depends on the subfield and somewhat on your level of experience in that field. But the approach I outlined works pretty well, gener

It's certainly true that it depends on the subfield and somewhat on your level of experience in that field. But the approach I outlined works pretty well, generally, and only serves to underscore how bad many papers are. For example, I'm not going to be able to pick up a paper from CERN and do most of the steps I outlined, but if I did do that, and found an obvious statistical anomaly in the first table, well...now I'd have something interesting to ask about and dig into.