One of my professors during PhD used to say “you can drive a truck through the holes in any given paper. so you look for what you *can* learn instead.” and being the smartass grad students we used to think driving that truck was fun. After so many years, I now appreciate her wisdom more than ever. All scholarly work has limitations but it’s refreshing when people critically evaluate what’s the actual value of the research. It's about humility, honesty, rigorous intellectual work.
@devezer I always tell students that reading papers (e.g. for a journal club) is about critiquing, not criticizing.
That is not to say one should ignore the negatives, but you should be looking at those with a positive attitude. How could this have been improved? Was it possible to do it? Does it really affect the conclusions of the article?
