Not many people have the time to focus first on whitepaper. I think it is best to first test the authenticity of the project by researching on the team. Confirm if the are real or not. After which you can now proceed on other aspects.
The team of a project can determine if a project will succeed or not.
Other things that need to looked into are a vast community, communication between the community and the team, the website, the whitepaper, the usecase. Then every project that has the tendency to succeed must have MVP.