[a_bonobo]

Uncritically reading every scientific paper you come across and taking the information in there for absolute truth is dangerous and a problem many untrained journalists have.

You need to have a background in sciences and a minimal understanding of statistics to properly judge the results - is the sample-size large enough, is it varied enough, did they use the correct statistical test for correlation - lots of papers out there are absolute crap (either unrepeatable results or missing mountains of needed information), published just because someone was friends with the editor or all peer-reviewers were asleep that day.

Note: Even the mythical Open Access doesn't help with this problem, as there too are editors deciding in favor of their friends and peer-reviewers gone fishing.