[wycx]

I suggest a key component of being able to "critique it creatively" is understanding the paper in the context of other work in the immediate sub-discipline, and the wider discipline.

I suspect there are insufficient focused waking hours in a three week period for any old university graduate to achieve that.

If I branch out into a nearby sub-discipline I end up spending a lot of time reading a lot of papers just to get sufficient context to make sense of a single paper, and that is starting from a base of knowledge of the broader discipline accumulated by someone several years post-PhD.

Even for practicing scientists, non-superficial critique of anything outside of ones immediate area of expertise takes work.

To work efficiently in your own sub-discipline, you have to be at the point where you can see references to Smith & Jones (1992) and implicitly know what that paper is about, and why it is referenced. That takes experience (you have to have read a lot of papers so you are already familiar with a reasonable portion of the references in a given paper) and you have to be practicing, (or at least I have to), otherwise you start to forget.