What are the practical implications of this?
A team going down the checklist would either demonstrate one of
1. They performed the step in the checklist and provide the corresponding sufficient/exhaustive evidence of having done so.
2. An explanation as to why that step is not applicable allowing them to skip said step.
An afterthought:
3. The following will not always be possible for any given experiment. However, the LK-99 experiment used cheap materials and a relatively straightforward process to create the material (from my readings of what others have said), I think the scientists in question should have attempted to reproduce the results of their experiment and document the number of successful attempts versus total attempts.
Is there no analogue in the physical sciences?
I'm not an expert in the field at all, but aiui that's why they would have been looking at what seem like roundabout tests etc. that don't seem like they're actually addressing what's interesting.
And yeah, you want the equipment sensitive enough to see that it is better than good metal like copper, which may be nontrivial in case your critical current is low.
After that, you can move on to other measurements
- has a striking drop in resistivity during a temperature change — a property published in 1951 as a property of copper sulfide
- has some ferromagnetic properties — enough to be tipped up in a magnetic field but not to levitate
I'm still interested int hat, as it seems like it could be quite useful and the LK-99 material is not especially hard to produce.