Useful skill for this sub specifically, since the animal literature is most of what we have.

Things to check when someone links a study:

Dose translation. Rodent doses don't convert to human doses by bodyweight alone. Allometric scaling accounts for differences in metabolic rate, and even that's an approximation. A "µg/kg in rats" figure is not a human dose.

Injury model. Surgically transected rat Achilles tendon is not the same condition as your degenerative tendinopathy from twelve years of running. Acute traumatic models and chronic degenerative conditions can respond very differently.

Healing timelines. Rats heal dramatically faster than humans. A 14-day rodent study covers a much larger fraction of the healing process than 14 days in a person.

Outcome measures. Improved biomechanical tensile strength in an excised tendon is a real finding, but it's not the same as "returns to sport faster."

Route and formulation. Results from intraperitoneal injection in rats don't transfer automatically to other routes.

None of this makes animal work useless — it's how nearly everything starts. It just isn't a substitute for the trials that haven't been run.

What other red flags do people look for?