Research focuses and trends in third molar: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract Aim The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis to quantitatively assess the current research trend, performance and focus over the last 30 years in third molars surgery. Materials and Method The data used in this study comes from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection, the online version of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI‐EXPANDED) (data updated on 22 March 2022). The extraction was conducted according to TOPIC (title, abstract, author keywords and KeyWords Plus ) from 1991 to 2020. Results During a period of 30 years, a total of 6569 publications were found within 15 document types published in SCI‐EXPANDED. Article types (88%) were published mostly frequently and had the most citations per publication, followed by review articles (3.9%). The top three publication countries were the USA, Brazil and the UK. Forty‐four percent of the articles were inter‐institutionally collaborative articles. Twenty percent of the articles were internationally collaborative articles. The most productive institutes over the past three decades have been the University of São Paulo (Brazil), followed by the University of Campinas (Brazil) and the University of North Carolina (USA). Keywords can be considered very helpful in article dissemination. Conclusion The present bibliometric analysis showed that articles published by international collaborative authors had the highest citations and there was no association between the number of citations and the quality of published articles on third molars. Identifying future research directions based on a bibliometric analysis of the characteristics of available literature in a field reduces the error margin and thus improves decision‐making.