Abstract

Bibliometric profile of articles published by pediatric dentists from Turkey were investigated in this study. Records of articles written with a pediatric dentist author between 2000- 2019 indexed in TR-Index database were compiled. Recurrent records and articles without a pediatric dentist author were excluded. Abstracts and full texts of the articles were processed to gather data of; year published, language, article’s area of interest (AoI), study design (Sd) and citation counts. Keyword co-occurrences were analyzed using VOSVIEWER® software.Spearman correlation analysis was performed between the numbers of dental schools, and number of published articles. Frequencies of categorical data were compared using chi square test. Differences between groups for continuous variables were assessed using Mann Whitney U test. P< 0.05 determined statistical significance. 512 articles were included. There was a positive correlation between the number of articles published and the number of dental schoolswho had started education(r=0.79, p< 0.001). The number of articles published in Turkish were more than English (X2= 157.531, 1) (p< 0.001). 300 of the articles were featured as research, 119 were reviews and 93 were case reports. Overall most frequently studied AoI was dental materials (23.8 %), followed by cariology/preventive dentistry (14.8%) and dental anomalies (10.2%). Laboratory research was the most preferred (26%) Sd, followed by literature review (23%), case reports (18.2%). Articles published in English were cited more than articles in Turkish (p= 0.02). Occurrences of the keywords were mostly nonspecific terms. Number of articles with pediatric dentist authors have been increasing remarkably since 2000. The increase in both the number of dental journals and the number of dental schools might have attributed to this trend. The next step for the authors of this field might be to branch out to less studied areas of interest and study designs to provide higher levels of evidence.

Key words: Bibliometry, pediatric, dentistry, dentistry