Yes, the first thing to check is the white paper. It can often happen that the white paper is poorly written. This by itself speaks a lot. I also tend to look for misprints. If you find mistakes, like typos or factual mistakes, it could be a sign of a sloppy project and a red flag.

Taking a look at GitHub, if it's an open source project, is another good advice. In particular, you would want to check the number of commits of the developers team. That is, check how active they are.

And finally, check the people behind the new coin or ICO. Check their past history. Did they have any other projects in the past? How successful those project were?