Yeah it depends heavily on the field and sometimes on the subfield.
Also the approach I use depends on how much I know about the field. If I know less, I weight the introduction more. If I know a lot, I skip almost all the sales and stage setting content. E.g. if it's a psych paper, often I jump directly to the results and only read other content if the results look reasonable. And so on.
So, I guess my only real point is that it's hard to take advice for how best to read a paper from someone (like your advisor) who knows the field much better than you do. You should probably gather as many tricks from the advice as you can, but maybe don't treat it as gospel and do lots of experimenting.
It's certainly true that it depends on the subfield and somewhat on your level of experience in that field. But the approach I outlined works pretty well, generally, and only serves to underscore how bad many papers are.
For example, I'm not going to be able to pick up a paper from CERN and do most of the steps I outlined, but if I did do that, and found an obvious statistical anomaly in the first table, well...now I'd have something interesting to ask about and dig into.
Also the approach I use depends on how much I know about the field. If I know less, I weight the introduction more. If I know a lot, I skip almost all the sales and stage setting content. E.g. if it's a psych paper, often I jump directly to the results and only read other content if the results look reasonable. And so on.
So, I guess my only real point is that it's hard to take advice for how best to read a paper from someone (like your advisor) who knows the field much better than you do. You should probably gather as many tricks from the advice as you can, but maybe don't treat it as gospel and do lots of experimenting.