The Trend of Quality of Publications in Endodontic Surgery: A 10-year Systematic Survey of the Literature

• The quality of studies in endodontics has increased over the last 10 years
• Correlation between impact factor and evidence level of published studies is unclear
• There is increasing attention to the experimental design in endodontic research

ObjectivesThe aims of the present systematic literature analysis were to evaluate, over a 10-year period, the trend of the proportion of RCT, SR, MA published on endodontic surgery, and to investigate if the impact factor (IF) of the main endodontic Journals correlates with the proportion of RCT, SR, MA they publish.MethodsAn electronic search of the RCT, SR and MA published on the topic “endodontic surgery” from 2001 to 2010 was performed on Medline and Cochrane CENTRAL database using specific search terms combined with Boolean operators. Endodontic Journals impact factor was retrieved by the Thomson Scientific database. The proportion of each study type over the total number of articles on endodontic surgery published per year was estimated. The correlation between the number of high-evidence level studies published on the main endodontic Journals and the IF of such Journals per year was estimated.ResultsFrom a total of 900 articles published in 2001–2010 on endodontic surgery, there were 114 studies of high evidence level. A significant increase of the proportion of either RCT, SR and MA over the years was found. A modest to unclear correlation was found between the Journal IF and the number of high-evidence articles published.ConclusionsThere is a positive trend over the years among researchers in performing studies of good quality in endodontic surgery. The impact factor of endodontic Journals is not consistently influenced by publication of high-evidence level articles.