I see a lot of people who basically skip to the figures, and take them at face value, and read nothing more about the paper.
When I read a paper I start with the abstract and go to the methods. then I inspect the figures carefully for the common tricks scientists play- axes tricks, overfitting, etc, looking to see whether I'm c onvinced the figures actually came from running an experiment, or just from copying and pasting other gels (this is extremely common).
I used to do: read the whole paper in order, recursively visiting each citation (often 2-3 levels deep); within a few hours, I was convinced the entirety of science is build on somewhat shoddy foundations.
When I read a paper I start with the abstract and go to the methods. then I inspect the figures carefully for the common tricks scientists play- axes tricks, overfitting, etc, looking to see whether I'm c onvinced the figures actually came from running an experiment, or just from copying and pasting other gels (this is extremely common).
I used to do: read the whole paper in order, recursively visiting each citation (often 2-3 levels deep); within a few hours, I was convinced the entirety of science is build on somewhat shoddy foundations.