Editorial: Adhesive Dentistry in the Mirror of Excellent Research.

Dear Reader, Repeatedly, we as Editors of the Journal of Adhesive Dentistry have highlighted the importance of our subdiscipline in the course of previous statements,1,2,7,8 which have been cited by the community. From our point of view, there is no doubt that Adhesive Dentistry – visibly represented by our Journal – has gained scientific importance during the last two decades, also having been especially promoted since the Journal was established in the field by Roulet and Degrange in 1999. All dental schools – at least those directly competing with medical disciplines within medical faculties3 – are often treated dismissively, due to the fact that in dentistry 1) less grant money flows than in specialities such as oncology, for example, and b) average impact factors are much lower compared to some medical fields such as immunology or microbiology.5 This leads to the common situation that dental schools are given just a condescending nod when it comes to direct competition regarding both grant money and cumulative impact factors.3 Nevertheless, it has been widely accepted that focussing solely on impact factors may falsify the image.5,6 Moreover, we previously stated that although it is an accomplishment to publish in a high JIF journal, when the paper is not cited, the value of this is questionable.5,6 On the other hand, there are plenty of highly cited papers in journals with comparably low JIF.6 Therefore, individualized correction factors have been requested in order to give a fairer picture of the variety of different scientific subdisciplines in general.4,6 By chance, we came across an interesting publication by Ioannidis et al, highlighting one such mathematical model and displaying the top 100,000 researchers worldwide in general as well as the top 2% in each subdiscipline, including dentistry as a subcategory of clinical medicine.4 This truly thrilling Excel sheet displays a variety of numbers and ranks, from citations to h-factors, and it uses a so-called composite index in order to rank within disciplines and subdisciplines. It is an honor for us to announce that Adhesive Dentistry plays a significant role in this list among 55,000 global dental researchers, and that the #1 dental researcher worldwide is David H. Pashley, the godfather of Adhesive Dentistry. Curious? Here’s the link: