Bibliometric Evaluation of Dental Research Productivity and Assessment of Influencing Factors in Pakistan

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the dental research productivity of Pakistan-based authors and assess the factors that can influence their performances. Methods: The bibliometric analysis was carried out to examine dental research contributed by Pakistani authors from 1993 to 2022. The bibliographic details of all the relevant published articles on dentistry were extracted from the Scopus database. The search strategy was built using pertinent keywords connected with different Boolean Operators. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria, 2859 articles were included in the final analysis. Micro-soft Excel and VOSviewer software were used to analyze the data. Results: Overall, Pakistan contributed 0.72 percent of the global dental research, however in the last five years, this ratio reached 1.56 percent. A slow research progress was recorded in the first 15 years, whereas exceptional growth was found in the last five years of study. The research impact analysis showed that the selected articles were cited with an average of 7.68 citations per article. Moreover, dental research co-authored with international authors had a higher citation impact than nationally collaborated or single-authored articles. The highest number of articles were found on Dental Education, followed by Oral Pathology/Medicine and Dental Public Health, however, the articles on Periodontics gained the highest citation impact. Most of the articles were published in locally published journals, and Saudi Arabia was found to be a vital partner in dental research. Conclusion: The research activities increased over time, and dental research with international collaboration had a better impact.