Contributions of Indian conservative dentists and endodontists to the Medline database during 1996-2009: A bibliometric analysis

Background: Analysis of publication trends will guide the policy framers, administrators, and dentists to frame future policies and design programs for the development of scientific and technological policies in the field of dentistry. Aims and Objectives: This study was undertaken to assess the trends in Indian Conservative dentists and endodontists′ Publication in PubMed-Medline database during 1996-2009. Materials and Methods: Using the time limitation of publication date limit of 1 st January 1996 to 31 st December 2009, all articles where authors′ affiliation had the words "Dental" AND "India" were selected. From this collection of articles, the following were noted down: year of publication, number of authors, name of the journal, reach of the journal, status of the journal, specialty of the first, state of origin, and type of research. From this database, the performance of department of conservative dentistry and endodontics was analyzed. Results: The number of articles published by conservative dentists and endodontists was 124. Among them, 63 got published in international journals and 61 in Indian journals. A majority of 33 journals were published in Indian Journal of Dental Research followed by 25 in the Journal of Conservative Dentistry. Out of these articles, 66 were on the basis of original research done by the authors. Nearly 45.2% of the published articles were from the institutes in Tamil Nadu, followed by Karnataka (30.6%), and Maharashtra (8.1%). Although the overall distribution of the publication trends seems to be constant from 1996 to 2006, there seems to be boom in the publication trend since 2007.