Low-quality papers based on public health data are flooding the scientific literature

The appearance of thousands of formulaic biomedical studies has been linked to the rise of text-generating AI tools.

Data from five large open-access health databases are being used to generate thousands of poor-quality, formulaic papers, an analysis has found. Its authors say that the surge in publications could indicate the exploitation of these databases by people using large language models(LLMs) to mass-produce scholarly articles, or even by paper mills — companies that churn out papers to order.