Is it normal to be suspicious of a really interesting finding but in an obscure journal and/or by authors from unknown universities EDIT Since there are some misunderstandings regarding my question I'll try to rephrase, and also avoid posting questions late at night when I am really tired :)



A typical part of my work as a bioinformatician/data analyst is to check the relevance of my results, when I am drafting my articles, by doing a series of literature searches to see how my results relate to the field in general. This typically takes me beyond my own competencies, and into fields like histology, oncology, tumor biology etc.. 

Quite often I run into very interesting results presented in articles that were published in obscure journals with pretty low IF (say for example 1.0-1.5). Sometimes the authors turn out to be from a rather unknown university from a unexpected country. I realize that this is a bit controversial, and I really don't mean to be looking down on anyone's creativity or work ethics but biomedical research is usually expensive, with all the lab consumables, customised reagents/antibodies/proteins/peptides etc.. 

One such example was an article I found yesterday where the authors claim prognostic potential for a particular protein which also happens to be significantly regulated in my dataset. Naturally I was excited at first but then two questions arose:


Could these people have really done what they claim they have done?
If the work is legit, then why it ended up going to a journal that's so obscure, considering that the findings might be very relevant for patient care. Cancer and biomarkers are two "hot" fields and there are literally lots of well known avenues for publication, before you come to think of this one, or this one. If the results are as interesting as I think they are then they should have surely been published in a venue where they'd get more attention. 


Am I being too harsh to be suspicious?
I am concerned by your choice of words:


"Obscure": one person's obscure may be another person's core community.
"Low IF": IF is very dependent on both community and "trendiness."  A lot of very good work is published in low IF venues because they are the appropriate place to publish the result.
"Unknown ... and unexpected": again, not unusual at all for something interesting to come out of an unexpected place.


All of these words, to me, point to lazy "popularity-contest" thinking in evaluating the context of a work.  Instead, I think that you should use more scientifically meaningful heuristics, such as:


Does the investigator have a history of solid work, into which this result fits?
Does the venue have a clear, well-defined focus and community, and does it have reputable management?
Is the work well-suited for the venue?


If a work doesn't pass these filters, then I think you should be highly suspicious and not bother digging more deeply.  If it does, however, then you should be just as skeptical as you should be for work coming out of a high-prestige laboratory in a leading institution---and no more.