An Assessment of Trends in Periodontal Randomized Controlled Trials

Objectives: In evidence-based dentistry (EBD), combined results from well-designed and implemented randomized control trials (RCTs) in the form of well-conducted and reported systematic reviews/meta-analyses provide unbiased guidance to clinicians. The objectives are two-fold: to determine the total number and trends of RCTs published in periodontics over time (select years) and to identify the area of periodontics that have a dearth of RCTs.
Methods: PubMed and Web of Science (WOS) were searched for RCTs in periodontics published up to 12/31/2014 by two investigators using ‘periodontics’ and ‘periodontology’ search terms in both databases with an English language filter. This study went through two rounds of filtering to identify trials. In the first filtering process, articles were identified as RCTs solely based on title and abstract. The second filtering comprised of reading the full text of the selected articles published in 2014, 2009, 2004, 1999, 1994, 1989, and 1984. Articles were eliminated due to not being RCTs, in-vitro or non-human studies, or topics unrelated to periodontics. From the selected trials, we are currently extracting descriptive data such as publication year, country of origin, number of authors, sample size, single/multi-center, funding source and categorization into a particular periodontics topic.
Results: After the first filtering in the PubMed database, we identified 2,452 articles for “Periodontics” and 2,973 articles for “Periodontology.” WOS yielded 610 and 452 articles, respectively. The second filtering resulted in a total of 546 articles (PubMed and WOS combined) for the selected years. The number of RCTs significantly increased over time with a slight drop in 2014.
Conclusions: The annual number of periodontal RCTs from selected years grew substantially over 1984-2014. The current process of data extraction identifies trends and dearth in periodontal RCTs to direct where future high-quality clinical research is needed.