You'll note that the people in this thread who claim to have higher levels of expertise reads the Methods section pretty closely. For the scientifically-intere

You'll note that the people in this thread who claim to have higher levels of expertise reads the Methods section pretty closely. For the scientifically-interested public this is where it can all go wrong since we lack the background to properly assess the methods since we've never done it before. Once we've gone through a paper and it all seems reasonable to us, we have to really seek out expert opinion on the methods and see what critiques are out there--we're not going to be able to judge the paper's methods in a relative vacuum of actual experience.