Frontiers in Public Health
Journal: Frontiers in Public Health Publisher: Frontiers Media S.A. ISSN: 2296-2565 Open Access: Yes (Gold OA, author-pays model) Impact Factor (2025): ~4.5 Scope: Multidisciplinary journal covering all aspects of public health, including epidemiology, health policy, global health, occupational health, and digital health.
🧪 Strengths
- Wide visibility and rapid publication: Articles are freely available and often indexed quickly, which can help disseminate findings in real time.
- Multidisciplinary reach: Encourages submissions from across fields (economics, epidemiology, digital health), which fosters cross-sector dialogue.
- Thematic flexibility: The journal accommodates emerging public health topics (COVID-19, AI in health systems, climate change) more readily than traditional outlets.
⚠️ Critical Weaknesses
1. **Editorial Volume vs. Rigor**
- The journal publishes hundreds of articles per month, which raises serious concerns about editorial selectivity. - The review process is often accelerated and editor-driven, with an emphasis on “collaborative” review that may discourage rejection and encourage compromise.
2. **Thematic Inflation and Policy-Friendliness**
- A large portion of articles serve more as policy cheerleading than critical analysis — praising reforms, digital tools, or systems with little concern for unintended consequences or confounders. - Quantitative noise is common: statistical methods are used to dress up simplistic or tautological claims.
3. **Lack of Conceptual Depth**
- Many papers use high-volume administrative data to draw shallow conclusions (e.g., “costs decreased” or “efficiency improved”) without exploring mechanisms, clinical nuance, or ethical trade-offs. - Qualitative understanding — the kind that actually informs patient care or structural reform — is often missing.
4. **Pay-to-Publish Model and Conflicts of Interest**
- As with all Frontiers journals, authors pay article processing charges (APCs) to publish. - This model may create perverse incentives for editorial teams to accept more articles to sustain revenue. - Guest-edited Research Topics are often populated by contributor networks, not necessarily by independent or critical peers.
🧮 Summary Table
| Aspect | Assessment |
| ——————————- | —————————————————————— |
| Scientific Rigor | Variable; many papers lack mechanistic depth |
| Peer Review Quality | Rapid, often superficial, author-friendly |
| Editorial Selectivity | Low; high acceptance rate and article volume |
| Use of Statistics | Often decorative, lacking causal validation |
| Role in Academia | Growing in volume, declining in prestige |
| Best Use Case | Preliminary studies, policy opinions, or data visualizations |
| Risk | Dilutes scientific discourse by blurring the line between science and advocacy |
🧠 Final Verdict
*Frontiers in Public Health* embodies the paradox of modern open-access publishing: accessible but inflated, fast but shallow, prolific but uncritical. While it serves as a platform for public health communication and visibility, it often falls short of scientific rigor, critical depth, and editorial integrity.
Researchers — especially clinicians and decision-makers — should approach its content with discerning skepticism.