齲齒指數與研究產能之文獻計量學

World Health Organization uses the DMFT index for permanent teeth as a marker for caries burden of disease. The DMFT index should be less than 2 among 12-year-olds by the year 2000. The aim of this article is to bring out the bibliographic review of all available literatures addressing the dental caries. According to the economic development of countries, the G7, Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) and Taiwan, Singapore, H.K and S. Korea (new industry economies, NIE) were investigated for the impact of economic development on national academic productivity and the DMFT index. This article conducted a search from the Science Citation Index Expanded, Web of Science and covers a bibliometric analysis of dental caries from 1991 to 2010 covering 5515 original article publications. The search was under the keywords ”caries” and ”dental”. The G7 industrial countries held the majority of total world production and the United States led the field in quantity and quality of publications. An inverse trend was observed for h-index and DMFT in G7, but the correlation between research production and DMFT was showed a positive relationship in NIE. With the synthetic analysis of DMFT and research productions that imply the successful prevention of caries is based on the economic development and research production. This bibliometric method helps relevant researchers understand the research production of caries in the world and establish the direction of further research in the prevention program of caries.