I'm not sure what you mean by "evaluating the science." A scientific paper should present a hypothesis, the author's best attempt to disprove the hypothesis, and an interpretation of the evidence gathered in the processes of testing the hypothesis. There's going to be a back-story, and it's likely to be quite involved.
The article does a good job of presenting a method for navigating a paper on this basis. I don't see what checking credentials adds to the process. On the contrary, it may do harm.
While we may find the high profile cases featured on Retraction Watch mainly in high impact journals, that's precisely because unscrupulous people deem these journals worth it to cheat to get into. Nobody cheats to get their paper into the International Journal of Architecture, Engineering and Nursing Science - because it and it's ilk are utter pieces of crap that will accept anything, up to and including randomly-generated text and pro-Sri-Lanka-highly-racist-UFO-conspiracies (real example). Teaching laypeople to avoid these is a very good idea.
It's a shortcut fraught with potential for deception, as even a casual glance through a site like Retraction Watch will demonstrate:
http://retractionwatch.com/
I'm not sure what you mean by "evaluating the science." A scientific paper should present a hypothesis, the author's best attempt to disprove the hypothesis, and an interpretation of the evidence gathered in the processes of testing the hypothesis. There's going to be a back-story, and it's likely to be quite involved.
The article does a good job of presenting a method for navigating a paper on this basis. I don't see what checking credentials adds to the process. On the contrary, it may do harm.