Introduction:  With heightened academic research competition, it is crucial for dental schools to maximize scholarly productivity (i.e., refereed publications). While publication quality can vary considerably, publication levels reflect levels of (a) manpower and (b) funding (government and non-governmental sources), although only governmental funding levels are public.  It has been hypothesized that a good research publication output for a dental school is 0.50 articles/faculty/year.

Objective:  Assess publication rates (articles/faculty/year) for individual US dental schools (clustered into logical groups) as a function of published NIH funding ranks. 

Methods:  2004 NIH-funding levels and ranks were obtained online (www.nih.nidcr.gov).  Data for 2004-faculty FTEs was obtained from ADA-CODA lists and adjusted to include administrators (N=nx1.1).  Published articles were determined using customized ISI-Web-of-Knowledge searches on address fields: AD=((sch or coll) SAME dent SAME “abbreviated name of school”) for “articles only” and “2005” publication year (presumed to associate with 2004 funding).  Information was resolved on all but four schools.  Articles/faculty/year were calculated by school and means averaged before statistically comparing (ANOVA, p£0.05, capital letters= differences/column) three logical groups (research-intensive, active, limited).

US Dental Schools: Research Group, Number (n)	2004 Res Rank	2004 NIH Res Funding ($/y)	2005 Pub/ School (mean±sd)	2004 FTE/ School (mean±sd)	Articles/ Faculty/ (Range)	Articles/ Faculty/y (mean±sd)STAT
Res-Intensive, n=12	1-13	>$6,000,000/y	58±24A	108±19A	0.34-0.77	0.54±0.22A
Res-Active, n=25	13-40	>$600,000/y	30±20B	101±55A	0.13-0.86	0.31±0.18B
Res-Limited, n=16	41-58	<$600,000/y	8±7C	61±38B	0.02-0.87	0.19±0.22B
Total:						0.38±0.24

Results: Results above showed research-intensive schools had the most publications (X=58±24, p<0.01), large faculties (108±19), and greater articles/faculty/y (0.54±0.22, p<0.01).  However, regression of articles/faculty/y versus NIH-funding amount by specific institution was poor (r²=0.25), presumably due to exclusion of non-government funding effects.

Conclusion:  Research-intensive dental schools had outputs (0.54 articles/faculty/y) that were remarkably close to the hypothesized target value (output=0.50).  However, outputs were not strongly linked to NIH-funding levels alone.