1. Look at the number of citations for an article. The higher the better. Less than 10 citations in most cases means that you can find a better paper.

A problem with this heuristic is that one may also cite a paper in order to debunk it, call it ridiculous, etc. Bem's psi paper has been cited 154 times, mostly by papers with titles such as "Fearing the Future of Empirical Psychology: Bem’s (2011) Evidence of Psi as a Case Study of Deficiencies in Modal Research Practice". So do also take a look at what those citing papers actually say.

Also, some papers may seem to have high citation counts, until you realize that it all comes from the author citing himself in later papers, or from random websites that Google Scholar counts as cites even though they are just pages put up by somebody who might be just as ignorant about the topic as you are.