Last year, Matt Spick began to notice oddly similar papers flooding in for peer review at Scientific Reports, where he is an associate editor. The papers all drew on a publicly available U.S. data set: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Such free data sources allow almost anyone to take a known research method and swap in new variables to create fresh "findings" in a kind of "research Mad Libs", says Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University.

To get a better understanding of how prevalent these studies are, he and his team searched two major databases of scientific papers, PubMed and Scopus, for studies using NHANES data that looked at single associations. They found 341 of these papers published in 147 journals, including Scientific Reports, BMC Public Health, and BMJ Open. A broader search finds that papers using the data set increased from 4926 in 2023 to 7876 in 2024.

Source  https://www.science.org/content/article/low-quality-papers-are-surging-exploiting-public-data-sets-and-ai

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