Contribution of dental private practitioners to publications on anatomical variations using cone beam computed tomography

Objective: To investigate the participation of citizens-dental private practitioner in scientific articles about anatomical variations on dentomaxillofacial CBCT. Our null hypothesis was that private practice practitioners are not involved in publications on anatomical variations using cone beam computed tomography. Material and methods: This study was performed from home without access to our university library. Only PubMed database was used to perform our study. We found 384 articles published among 1830 articles corresponding to our inclusion/exclusion criteria. For each selected article we searched for affiliation of all of the authors (university, private dental practice, students, other). We applied a co-creation approach to involve colleagues from private practice in analyzing results of this study. Results: A large majority of authors have university affiliation (96.5%). Only 3% of authors come from private practice. Most of articles belong to the group of 7 emergent economies (E7), and from Asia. 47.9% of 96 journals published only one article on anatomical variations discovered on CBCT. The higher number of articles (18.75%) were published by journals related to endodontics. The 84% of articles were dispersed among a vast span of general and specific dental, and maxillofacial journals. The 68.4% of articles on variations in CBCT were available in closed access and 31.6% of articles were available in open access. Only 6.7% of articles were published in open access without author publication charges (APC). The 31.6% of authors with university affiliation choose open access for their article. 7.8% of authors from private practice were involved in publishing in closed access journals and 2.34% in open access journals. Only 3 articles (0.78%) were published by authors affiliated to private practice without involvement of university authors. 2.6% of articles involved students as co-authors. Authors with other affiliation were involved only in one closed access publication. For the step of co-creation none of 183 private practitioners, and 3/33 (9%) university-affiliated members of Nemesis Facebook group actively participated in analyzing the results of this study. Conclusions: the null hypothesis was accepted: dentists from private practice are exceptionally involved in publications on anatomical variations using CBCT in dentomaxillofacial area.