Evolution of Esthetic Publications in Dentistry, Research Trends, and Global Productivity: A Bibliometric Analysis.

Purpose: To perform a bibliometric study in the literature about the increasing number of global studies on dental esthetics in recent years.

Materials and methods: Articles on dental esthetics published between 1980 and 2021 were pulled from the Web of Science (WoS) database. In this comprehensive bibliometric study on dental esthetics, a summary of 2,858 articles published in the last 41 years was shared. Network visualization maps were used to identify citation analyses and trending topics. Spearman correlation coefficient was used for correlation studies. The exponential smoothing estimator was used to estimate the number of articles to be published in the coming years.

Results: Of the 3,666 publications, 2,858 (77.9%) were articles. The top three contributing countries to the literature were the USA (816, 28.5%), Brazil (286, 10%), and Italy (246, 8.6%). The most active institution was the University of Bern (n = 55). The journal with the highest number of articles was Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry (n = 178). According to the average number of citations per article, the most influential journal was Journal of Periodontology (citations: 55.6).

Conclusions: Keywords of the trending topics related to dental esthetics are perception, bleaching, cleft lip, connective tissue graft, smile esthetics, adolescent, esthetic region, soft tissue augmentation, and clinical studies. In regard to the global output in dental esthetics, this article is a useful resource for clinicians, scientists, and dental students.