Topic Modeling as a Tool to Identify Research Diversity: A Study Across Dental Disciplines

This study investigates the diversity and evolution of research topics within the dental sciences from 1994 to 2023, using Topic modeling and Shannon’s entropy as a measure of research diversity. We analyzed a dataset of 412,036 scientific articles across six dental disciplines: Orthodontics, Prosthodontics, Periodontics, Implant Dentistry, Oral Surgery, and Restorative Dentistry. This research relies on BERTopic to identify distinct topics within each field. The study revealed significant shifts in research focus over time, with some disciplines exhibiting robust growth in article numbers, such as Periodontics and Prosthodontics. However, despite the overall increase in publications, the number of topics per discipline varied, with Restorative Dentistry increasing at a faster rate and exceeding 50 topics over the last 15 years. We observed an increasing diversification of research efforts in disciplines such as Restorative Dentistry, with entropy levels consistently above 2 and progressively increasing. In contrast, fields such as Prosthodontics, despite high publication output, maintained a more specialized research focus, reflected in entropy levels remaining below 1.5. Oral Surgery showed a steep increase in research diversification until 2000, after which it stabilized. Taken together, our findings describe the dynamic nature of dental research and highlight the balance shifts in research focus across several key areas of Dentistry.