(8 Oct 2025) Two major publishers have begun to automatically reject the vast majority of papers based on public health data sets, following revelations that unscrupulous actors use these data sets to churn out nonsense scientific papers.
Last month, PLOS and Frontiers both announced submissions that use data sets such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–run National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which collects diet and health data on more than 130,000 people, will not even be considered, unless the researchers do additional work to confirm their findings. Individual journals are imposing similar restrictions.
The new policies should help weed out fraudulent papers, at least in the short term, says Matt Spick, a statistician at the University of Surrey who brought the problems to light. But some researchers worry the rule could create unnecessary barriers for genuine research that can benefit public health. “It’s good to have some guardrails,” says Thu Nguyen, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland. But “don’t just throw the whole thing away and say it’s all garbage.”
Find out more on Science here.
