[MAGZine]

I'm by no means an academic, but...

1) is it a journal that I've heard of? Does it have a reputation?

2) who are the authors? what else have the published in the same vein?

3) who funded the research?

4) what sort of content does it survey? who does it cite?

5) how thorough is the study? Is it a low-power study that barely gets a p < 0.05 result?

there's a lot to look at beyond the content. The content itself is (of course) the most important part, but you might not be able to assess it without a doctorate. That is what peer review is for.

None of these are also necessarily on their own to write a paper off. But I'm going to trust something more that appears in the lancet vs some journal I've never heard of before.