Bibliometric Analysis of the Dental Science Articles Published in The Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences (IJMS) from 2002 to 2015 over a 14-Year Period

Dear Editor, There have been a rising trend in publishing dental science articles in medical journals. 1 Bibliometric and scientometric information regarding the trends in dental science articles in medical journals from India is evident in the literature. 1 More recently, the publication trends of oral pathology articles published in a pathology journal from Iran were reported. 2 This study aimed to audit the dental science articles published in 62 issues of The Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences (IJMS) from 2002 to 2015 over a 14-year period. The articles published were analyzed for type of article (editorials, review articles, original articles, case reports, brief reports, commentaries, book reviews, photo clinics, and letters to the editor) and topic of individual dental specialties. The supplementary issue on conference proceedings (IJMS Vol. 40:3 Supplement May 2015) was excluded from the study. The contents of the published articles were grouped into 10 individual dental specialty articles namely oral pathology and microbiology, oral medicine and radiology, oral and maxillofacial surgery, pedodontics, periodontics, conservative dentistry and endodontics, prosthodontics, orthodontics, community dentistry, and implantology. The topics pertaining to dental sciences were selected by scrutinizing the contents of the published articles without considering the specialty of the author (medical and dental). The articles which were interdisciplinary or multispecialty in approach were counted under all the dental sciences to which they belonged. The articles published were not only checked for authorship trends but also evaluated to identify whether or not the studies were a funded research project. This study reported that case reports (n=17) took a major share of the published articles on dental sciences published in the IJMS, followed by original articles (n=14), review articles (n=9), brief reports (n=5), and letters to the editor (n=2). A study on the trends of dental specialty articles published in a medical journal from India found that original articles (n=55) and case reports (n=49) constituted the most frequent dental science articles. 1 Additionally, the majority of the published articles were related to oral medicine and radiology (n=35), followed by oral pathology and microbiology (n=31), oral and maxillofacial surgery (n=24), community dentistry (n=6), periodontics (n=5), pedodontics (n=4), conservative dentistry and endodontics (n=2), and orthodontics (n=1). Dental specialties such as prosthodontics and implantology were untouched over 14 years of publication. In Medical Journal Armed Forces India, the majority of the published articles on dental specialties were related to oral medicine and radiology (n=56), followed …