[BorisVSchmid]

Somehow, physics does not appear to need such extensive vetting - to me (as an outsider) it seems like physicists can find what they need on arxiv.org

Hope that model successfully crosses over to biology (biorxiv.org). For now, I use the following heuristic after finding an article on google/google scholar:

* do I know the journal at all (to filter out vanity journals) * do I know the researchers involved (and I learn of new researchers through citations in papers, through presentations online or at conferences and through twitter) * I look at the number of citations of the paper (using google scholar) and relevance of the papers that already cite the paper of interest (using google scholar).

In addition, I also read papers :-).