Can I trust this paper?

After a decade of data falsification scandals and replication failures in psychology and related empirical disciplines, there are urgent calls for open science and structural reform in the publishing industry. In the meantime, however, researchers need to learn how to recognize tell-tale signs of methodological and conceptual shortcomings that make a published claim suspect. I review key problems and ways to detect them, including data fabrication or falsification, low precision of estimates, incorrectly performed or interpreted statistical procedures, biased meta-analyses, and over-generalization of results. The main takeaway is to verify that the methodology is robust and to distinguish between what the actual results are and what the authors claim these results mean when citing empirical work.