Guest editorial

The quantitative and qualitative leap in Brazilian dental research

It has been a while that Brazilian dental research has been recognized in the national and international academic circles as one of the most important ones. In the last decades, a considerable increase in the number of published scientific articles from Brazilian researchers and institutions has been seen in international journals, including the ones of high impact factor.

A search in the most used international databases, such as Pubmed, Scopus and Web of Science, allows us to easily verify this. For example, Scopus data from 2008 show Brazil in fourth place in the ranking of the countries with the highest number of publications between 1996 and 2007, with a total of almost 4.000 publications in that period. This information shows that, although great progress in the number of published articles, yet we can grow more, reaching the heights of the top three on the list: United States (about 20,300 articles), United Kingdom (about 7,600 articles) and Japan (about 7,200 articles). A good perspective of future growth may be seen by searching Pubmed, which reveals that about 9.2% of the 2009 published articles from dental journals in this database are Brazilian.

If we can quantitatively see an increase of published texts in relevant international journals, the Brazilian publications quality and impact may be measured by the number of citation of our articles. In this aspect we leave much to be desired, since citations to Brazilian articles still have low frequency. But the good news is that this number, although low, has increased in the last years, which shows greater integration and recognition of the national research by their peers worldwide.

The quality and quantity of Brazilian research is due not only to the formation of researchers, but also to the fact that there are lots of Brazilian post-graduation programs, since most of the published articles is a result of scientific researches performed in those courses.

Our challenge to the next years will be not only to keep or increase even more the number of publications in high impact factor journals, but also to make our papers become more internationally recognized and cited, which can only be achieved through the publication of relevant and innovative scientific researches, with effective knowledge generation.

Prof. Dr. Carla Castiglia Gonzaga
Prof. Dr. Allan Fernando Giovanini
Professors of the Masters Program in
Clinical Dentistry, Positivo University