Studies based on the TriNetX platform – which provides access to anonymized electronic health records for more than 300 million patients in the United States and abroad – have skyrocketed in recent years. Joshua Wang, a neuroscientist at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital who trains researchers there to use TriNetX, has noticed another trend, too. Some results, he says, look “a bit dodgy.”

He and others say the easy-to-use platform may be allowing inexperienced researchers – potentially aided by artificial intelligence (AI) – to churn out unreliable and bias-ridden studies with unrivaled speed. In 2025, nearly 2700 publications mentioned TriNetX in the title or abstract, up from just 33 only 5 years prior, according to the Dimensions database, which tracks abstracts and citations. Less than halfway through this year, the number already exceeds 2100.

The rise mirrors recently reported trends seen in papers using publicly available health data sets, which are authored primarily by researchers in China. But TriNetX is only open to users at participating health care organizations, and most TriNetX papers come from authors at U.S. medical schools, often with a physician-in-training as lead author.

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/medical-students-are-using-popular-research-tool-pump-out-misleading-studies

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