Quantitative snapshot of orofacial pain research: a bibliometric study

Objectives: The topic of orofacial pain spans various scientific and medical disciplines ranging from basic neuroscience to medical dentistry. This bibliometric approach provides a quantitative view of the scientific literature published on orofacial pain. Methods: Publications scrutinized for relevancy to orofacial pain and indexed in the ISI-Thomson Current Content Life Sciences and Clinical Medicine collections for 2004-2005 were retrieved for this study. Results: The 975 relevant journal papers were co-authored by researchers from 55 countries: the most prolific were the USA (293), Japan (107), United Kingdom (90) and Germany (67). Other top-publishing countries include Canada (52), Italy (49), Sweden (46), Brazil and Turkey each with 44. More than half of the remaining countries published five or fewer papers. The European Union (including 19 member countries) contributing 384 papers is certainly a major player. The percentage of intra-national collaborations among the top-15 most prolific countries was greater (and therefore deemed more important) than those of their international collaborations. The orofacial pain scientific literature was published in 247 different journals. While slightly over 6% of these journals concentrated circa 46% of the publications, 75% of the journals had three or fewer papers. Thirteen of the 15 most prolific journals were in the subdiscipline Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine; the most prolific journal, Journal of Orofacial Pain had 59 papers and an impact factor of 1.93 for 2005. Most of the papers focused on clinical approach of orofacial pain, and were distributed among the subdisciplines of Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine (523), Neurology (92), and Otolaryngology (34); for basic research papers most were in the Neurosciences & Behavior (131) subdiscipline. Conclusions: From a quantitative description of some basic characteristics of journal (and their papers), this study highlights the importance of orofacial pain research as viewed by the scientific community.