Investigación odontológica en Colombia: estudio preliminar de la producción científica registrada y avalada en los GrupLAC

Abstract

Introduction: Dental research in Colombia has showcased a growth in the last years, Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Minciencias) backs up investigation groups and promotes scientific research; however, there has been few investigations done regarding the publication of scientific papers on research groups in dentistry. Objectives: To assess the dental scientific production trends from 22 Colombian research groups (RG) endorsed by 13 dental schools. Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed with 725 published papers registered in the GrupLAC platform (Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation -Minciencias-) from 2012 to 2018. Twenty-two RG were randomly selected from a total of 49. The variables analyzed were related to the RG (name, university, grading according to Minciencias, and number of papers), related to the article (title, language, journal’s name and quartile based on SCImago, year, and place of publication, number of authors, and citation count based on Google Scholar), and related to authors (name, sex, affiliation, and country of residence). The data was recorded in an Excel spreadsheet that was sent to every research group’s leader to corroborate the information. A descriptive and bibliometric analysis was conducted using Stata v.17 and Vantage Point. This research was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee. Results: After deduplication, 665 scientific papers were published in 209 journals. There were 1493 authors, affiliated to 214 institutions from 32 countries. The number of authors per paper ranged from 1 to 35 (Me=4), and the sampled researchers were evenly classified according to sex (662 males vs 557 females). The analyzed publications received 9124 citations, ranging from 0 to 207 (Me=5). The largest number of scientific papers were published in “Avances en Odontoestomatología” (n=45), followed by “Revista de la Facultad de Odontología de la Universidad de Antioquia” (n=34). National co-authorship networks were predominant, although international co-authorship was on the rise for RG with the highest grade according to Minciencias. Also, publishing in journals with the highest quartiles was frequent for upper-tier research group members. Conclusions: Dental scientific production from Colombian research groups was concentrated in nationally edited journals. However, international trends in collaboration and publishing are consolidating for specific research groups.