Changes in ethics and transparency reporting in dental journal articles between 2021 and 2025: a full-text cross-journal analysis

Introduction: Explicit reporting of research ethics and transparency practices is increasingly emphasized in biomedical publishing, but whether recent changes have occurred uniformly across reporting domains remains unclear. Methods: We conducted a full-text, cross-journal text-mining study of 240 dental journal articles published in 2021 and 2025, with 20 articles per journal-year stratum across six established dental journals. Full text was screened for eight predefined markers: ethics approval, informed consent, conflict-of-interest disclosure, funding disclosure, data availability, trial registration, animal ethics, and AI/LLM disclosure. Automated detection was checked against single-reader manual coding of a 36-article sample (96.2% agreement). Prevalence was compared using Fisher exact tests. Reported percentages are corpus-level detection rates across all 120 articles per year, not compliance rates among the studies to which each marker applies. Ethics approval (53.3% to 69.2%), funding disclosure (58.3% to 73.3%), and animal ethics (1.7% to 8.3%) showed smaller directional increases. Conflict-of-interest disclosure was near-universal in both years (95.8% and 97.5%). Informed consent and trial registration showed little change. AI/LLM disclosure was detected only in 2025 (0% to 4.2%). Mean detected markers per article increased from 2.73 to 3.55, and no 2025 article reported zero markers. Discussion: These findings indicate uneven changes in dental reporting, with the clearest gains in data availability statements and little change in ethics approval, consent, or trial registration.