title: Half-century of Dental Public Health research: bibliometric analysis of world scientific trends.
abstract: To describe the characteristics of Dental Public Health (DPH) scientific publications within core DPH journals over time and to compare DPH journals with DPH content from other journal types.
  
  
  
  The Scopus database was used to identify DPH-relevant articles published from 1965 to 2014 in three core DPH journals (DPHJs) and from 2005 to 2014 in Dental Journals (DJs), Public Health (PHJs) and General Journals (GJs). To identify DPH-relevant articles, a search strategy with words about oral health and public health was applied to each group of journals. Research themes were created by grouping similar keywords to report changes in the focus of articles over time. The most productive journals, countries, institutions and authors were also estimated for each set of journals.
  
  
  
  In 2005-2014, 60 297 articles were identified, of which 2.7% in DPHJs, 10.4% from PHJs, 38.2% from GJs and 48.7% from DJs. DPH-relevant articles published in the core DPHJs, DJs and PHJs tended to share a strong emphasis on dental caries, healthcare/services research on children and adolescents. Over time, the focus in the DPHJs has increased towards health behaviour/promotion/education, quality of life and socioeconomic factors. In the last decade, those themes were more frequent in DPH journals than in the other groups.
  
  
  
  DPH research published in DPHJs had some unique features and greater focus on the themes of quality of life, socioeconomic factors and health behaviour/education/promotion than other groups of journals.
authors: Faculty of Dentistry, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. roger.keller@ufrgs.br.
authors: Roger Keller
authors: 0000-0002-2468-6655
authors: RK
authors: Celeste
authors: Sir John Walsh Research Institute, Faculty of Dentistry, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
authors: Jonathan M
authors: JM
authors: Broadbent
authors: Faculty of Dentistry, Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.
authors: Samuel Jorge
authors: SJ
authors: Moyses
mesh_terms: D015706:Bibliometrics; D018865:Dental Research / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014943:Global Health / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D009910:Oral Hygiene / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011636:Public Health Dentistry / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011788:Quality of Life; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: bibliometrics oral health; dentistry; public health; science