[physicsguy]

You often can’t. It depends on how accessible the field is, but in my area, you can’t pick out a single paper and judge it as “good” or “bad”, you need an understanding of the field, etc. etc. and that takes at least months and often a couple of years to build up. If I was to go and move to a new area of Physics, I would seek out the widely cited papers first and spend time making sure I understood the key foundations, probably pick up a recent-ish graduate level text book, etc. etc. before trying to go to modern papers now topic.

Almost all papers will overstate their own importance in the introduction, because you have to do that to get published. It takes context of the field to know for e.g. “oh, this guy is just running random simulations and picking out odd results and publishing them” vs “this person has done a comprehensive set of simulations by doing realistic parameter sweeps and has published the whole results set”.

When reporters write stories, they often just take press releases that groups put out themselves. Some groups sell themselves better than others. In my old field, one group in France looks “dominant” if you look at the news, but in reality they’re one of many that do good work, the others just have less press around it because they’re not working at such press hungry organisations.