Italian scientific production in dentistry: comparative bibliometric analysis of the last 3 decades

OBJECTIVES In the last decades, Italian scientific production has grown in several areas of medical sciences, includ-ing dentistry. Understanding the trends and patterns of scientific production in dentistry can provide insights into the research interests and priorities of Italian researchers, as well as identify potential future research areas. Therefore, a large bibliometric analysis was conducted by analyz-ing all the articles published in the last 30 years in dental journals in-dexed in Scopus that had at least one author with Italian affiliation. We carried out a comparative anal-ysis by decade to study the trend of bibliometric parameters over time. MATERIALS AND METHODS In January 2023, all articles pub-lished from 1993 to 2022 in jour-nals indexed in the “Dentistry” category of Scopus with at least one author affiliated with any Ital-ian institution were searched. For each decade, the most active au-thors and affiliations, the most contributing journals, and the most cited articles were identified. Maps were created to represent the keyword co-occurrence net-work and the co-authorship net-work by country. Finally, the main topic, study type, and percentage of studies with foreign co-authors of the 1000 most cited articles in each decade were analyzed. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS Italian scientific production has in-creased progressively over time with an average growth rate of +10.2%; 1478 documents were published from 1993 to 2002 (first decade), 5968 documents from 2003 to 2012 (second decade) and 8859 documents from 2013 to 2022 (third decade). The year with the highest number of articles published was 2020 (n = 1038). Adriano Piattelli was the most pro-lific author in the first and second decades, while Giovanni Lodi was the first for the documents pub-lished during the third decade. The Università degli Studi di Milano was the most productive affiliation. The analysis of the authors’ key-words revealed a change in re-search interests over time. In the analysis of the 1000 most cited articles of each decade, a variation in the disciplines addressed and the type of study was ob-served. In general, the most fre-quent topics were “implantology”, “periodontology” and “oral pathol-ogy”, while the most frequent study type was “observational study”. The analysis of international col-laboration highlighted that the percentage of articles with at least one foreign author has increased over time, from 28% in the first decade, to 43% in the second one and 49% in the third one. CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE Bibliometric analyses in academia have gained increasing impor-tance due to the need for objec-tive quantification of scientific out-put. This bibliometric study allows to highlight the contribution of Ita-ly to dental world research, to identify the most influential national authors or institutions, and the trends in interest in the differ-ent topics.