US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS)

data category: Health data · 1 paper in the last 7 days

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Population health statistics, disease burden, health surveys and pandemic trackers.

Names searched for: NHANES, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, BRFSS, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey

Key findings#

From Nov 2023 to Oct 2026, 186 archived papers mentioned US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS) in their title, abstract or keywords (the search of earlier months' full texts is still under way), most of them in Jul 2026 (10).
US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS) was mentioned in 3 papers in the last 30 days (2026-10-07 to 2026-11-05), ranking #103 of the 246 datasets mentioned.
By journal category: Statistics (1), Health Economics and Policy (1) and Economics (1).
Most of them appeared in BMC Medical Research Methodology (1), Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation (1) and Food Policy (1).
From 2017 to 2026 (so far), US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS) was mentioned in 279 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in health economics and policy (136), economics (52) and statistics (44).
60 of them were published in 2025, against 15 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were IZA - Institute of Labor Economics (6), Columbia University (5) and National Bureau of Economic Research (5).
The journals publishing most of them were SSM - Population Health (11), Journal of Public Health Policy (9) and Social Science & Medicine (8).
The most-cited of them is “An efficient convolutional neural network for coronary heart disease prediction” (Expert Systems with Applications, 2020), with 273 citations.
Papers use US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS) most often with UCI Machine Learning Repository (14), American Community Survey (12) and Health and Retirement Study (12); it has 27 partners in the code and data network, in the group around World Development…, Eurostat, International Energy….

Mentions over 36 months#

Papers mentioning it by publication month, Nov 2023 to Oct 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords; the full texts of earlier months are still being searched)
Trend	Nov 23–Oct 24	Nov 24–Oct 25	Nov 25–Oct 26	36 months
	50	71	65	186

Papers per year#

20172026 (so far)

Papers per publication year and category
Category	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026 (so far)
Health Economics and Policy	9	3	6	8	10	9	15	23	26	27
Economics	5	3	1	1	4	1	2	18	11	6
Statistics	0	2	1	1	0	7	6	9	6	12
AI	0	1	0	1	1	2	0	5	12	10
Operations Research	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	3	2
Information Systems	1	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0
Management	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	1
Higher Education and Research	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
Marketing	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0
Finance	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
All categories	15	9	8	12	15	19	24	57	60	60

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	SSM - Population Health	11
2	Journal of Public Health Policy	9
3	Social Science & Medicine	8
4	PharmacoEconomics	8
5	BMC Medical Research Methodology	8
6	Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation	7
7	Economics & Human Biology	7
8	PharmacoEconomics - Open	7
9	Computational Statistics & Data Analysis	5
10	Health Economics Review	5

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	IZA - Institute of Labor Economics	6
2	Columbia University	5
3	National Bureau of Economic Research	5
4	Stanford University	5
5	The Ohio State University	5
6	University of Southern California	5
7	Duke University	4
8	King Saud University	4
9	University of Michigan	4
10	Vanderbilt University	4

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	United States	101
2	United Kingdom	27
3	China	20
4	Germany	14
5	Italy	12
6	Spain	11
7	Canada	10
8	Australia	8
9	Ireland	7
10	India	6

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	NHANES	21
2	health care costs	13
3	gender differences	12
4	Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System	11
5	Medical Expenditure Panel Survey	11
6	quality-adjusted life years	11
7	diabetes mellitus	10
8	class imbalance	9
9	health disparities	9
10	obesity	9

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	273	3.5	An efficient convolutional neural network for coronary heart disease prediction	Expert Systems with Applications	2020-05-21	Aniruddha Dutta, Tamal Batabyal, Meheli Basu et al.
2	102	4.3	Advances in ECG and PCG-based cardiovascular disease classification: a review of deep learning and machine learning methods	Journal Of Big Data	2024-11-07	Asmaa Ameen, Ibrahim Eldesouky Fattoh, Tarek Abd El‐Hafeez et al.
3	96	0.9	Marriage and health: Selection, protection, and assortative mating	European Economic Review	2018-03-18	Nezih Guner X, Yuliya A. Kulikova, Joan Llull
4	65	1.1	Graph-based multi-label disease prediction model learning from medical data and domain knowledge	Knowledge-Based Systems	2021-11-01	Thuan Pham, Xiaohui Tao, Ji Zhang et al.
5	62	1.9	Robots, meaning, and self-determination	Research Policy	2024-03-12	Milena Nikolova, Femke Cnossen, Boris Nikolaev

Archive counts by publication year: a paper counts when its title, abstract or keywords name the dataset, or when OpenAlex's full-text search finds it there (searched for the last 30 days' papers and, by a pass over the past years, for older ones). Names added to the list later are looked for in older papers as the archive is read again.

Used together with#

Papers use US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS) most often with UCI Machine Learning Repository (14), American Community Survey (12) and Health and Retirement Study (12); it has 27 partners in the code and data network, in the group around World Development…, Eurostat, International Energy…. The whole network →

What papers use US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS) together with (at least 3 papers; lift 1 = chance)
Used with	Type	Papers using both	Lift
UCI Machine Learning Repository	Dataset	14	3.8
American Community Survey	Dataset	12	6.8
Health and Retirement Study	Dataset	12	7.4
Bureau of Labor Statistics	Dataset	11	5.1
Eurostat	Dataset	8	0.9
Global Burden of Disease	Dataset	8	2.6
PSID	Dataset	8	6.9
IPUMS	Dataset	7	7.9
Kaggle	Dataset	7	2.0
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS)	Dataset	5	2.2
MIMIC	Dataset	5	2.5
WITS / TRAINS tariff data	Dataset	5	1.2

Papers mentioning US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS) in the last 30 days, newest first.
Date	Title	Journal	Authors	Affiliations
2026-10-31	Validation of the Kythera Labs all-payer real-world data asset: a provenance-anchored nine-block framework for tokenized evidence generation	BMC Medical Research Methodology	Onur Başer	City University of New York; Boğaziçi University
2026-10-27	Trends in telehealth utilization and cost of office-based care in the United States: evidence from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, 2020–2023	Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation	Kolade Olatunde	University of Arkansas at Fayetteville
2026-10-24	The intensive margin of food access and its association with health outcomes: evidence of heterogeneous effects across U.S. Communities	Food Policy	Qingwei Qiao, Syed Badruddoza, Modhurima Dey Amin et al.	Washington State University; Texas Tech University; Economic Research Service

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS). Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/us-health-surveys-nhanes-brfss-meps

@misc{scholar4ai-datasets-us-health-surveys-nhanes-brfss-meps,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {US health surveys (NHANES, BRFSS, MEPS)},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/us-health-surveys-nhanes-brfss-meps}},
  urldate = {2026-11-05},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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