Reasons to stop reading an article

Huge quantities of medical papers are published every day in biomedical journals, but unfortunately, a high proportion of them have methodological errors that may question the validity of their results. These errors are usually due to the lack of knowledge about methodology by the authors, who are primarily clinical physicians, and the lack of adequately trained reviewers in scientific journals. Also, sometimes mistakes can be made deliberately to favor obtaining certain conclusions, as in the cases with conflict of interest. In this article we offer some tips to assess the quality of scientific papers to try to avoid wasting our valuable time with articles that might not be of our interest.