Research Trends of Domestic Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology through Analysis of Articles Published in the Korean Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology

The purpose of this study was to examine the state of the articles in the Korean Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology and overall research trends in this field in an effort to grasp the reality of the Journal and suggest some of the right directions for the development of research in this field. 332 articles that were printed in the Korean Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology over the past decade (2003-2012) were selected for the purpose of analysis. As a result of analysing the 332 articles in 52 issues of the Journal, it"s found that a mean of 6.3 articles were contained in each issue. As for the form of article, original articles was more common than case reports, which were respectively used in 275 articles (82.8%) and 57 articles (17.2%). Concerning research methods by year, cell culture was most prevailing (124 articles, 37.3%), followed by clinicopathologic study (68, 20.5%), case report (62, 18.8%), animal experiments (28, 8.4%), clinical trial study (28, 8.4%) and others (22, 6.6%). As to the number of researchers, the majority of the articles were written by two or more researchers. The most common number of researchers was three (66 articles, 19.9%), and the number of the articles written by two (49, 14.8%) was similar to that of the articles written by four (47, 14.2%). 38 articles (11.4%) were written by eight researchers or more. Regarding the language of the articles, Korean was used in 213 articles (64.2%), and English was used in 119 articles (35.8%). As for the number of references, this number ranged from a low of zero(in the articles related to the history of pathology) to a high of 71, and the average number of references was 27.91. In relation to the themes of research, the largest number of the articles (47, 32.6%) dealt with oral squamous cell carcinoma, followed by diseases related to odontogenic carcinoma (21, 14.5%), diseases related to odontogenic cyst (17, 11.7%), salivary gland tumor (seven, 4.8%) and granuloma (five, 3.5%). The efforts by this study to explore the shifts of articles and recent research trends are expected to provide useful information on how to accelerate the identity building of this journal and the development of research in oral and maxillofacial pathology.ope