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.
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.