Dentistry & Oral Health Research

Dentistry and oral health research covers the teeth, gums, jaws, saliva and oral mucosa, and how the mouth relates to the rest of the body. Its research runs on a small set of shared institutions. In the United States the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research was created in 1948 under the National Dental Research Act, is one of the 27 institutes and centers at the National Institutes of Health, and describes its mission as advancing fundamental knowledge about dental, oral and craniofacial health and disease. Its extramural pages list funding opportunities, grant programmes, training awards, loan repayment and scientific data sharing.

The International Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research publishes the Journal of Dental Research and JDR Clinical & Translational Research, and organises its members into scientific groups that cut across the specialisms. FDI World Dental Federation represents national dental associations and publishes policy statements in the International Dental Journal. The European Federation of Periodontology produces consensus workshops and S3-level guidelines, and the ADA Forsyth Institute is one of the few independent oral health research institutes.

A researcher or administrator entering the field should expect recurring practice questions: which caries or periodontal classification a protocol uses, whether a study counts as a clinical trial that must be registered, how trial evidence is synthesised, for example through Cochrane Oral Health, how practice-based studies recruit dental practices, and how data and microbiome sequences are deposited. At the policy level, the World Health Assembly approved an oral health resolution in 2021 and adopted a global strategy in 2022. The specialisations below cover the sub-fields in detail. This hub covers research practice only and does not give clinical or treatment advice.