The Similarity between Science and Technology Literature in Dental Implants Field

Introduction: The relationship between science and technology is of evolving and changing type, and it might vary from discipline to discipline and from time to time. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate and explain the relationship between the science and technology in dental implants field. Methods: This study was implemented through content analysis, using co-word analysis approach. The database on the United States Patent and Trademark Office was used to retrieve patents, while the PubMed was used to retrieve the papers in dental implants field. In total, 1479 papers as well as 433 patents were studied. The phrase "dental implants" was searched as a Mesh descriptor, and the document type was filtered by "clinical trial". Results: Assessment of the asymmetric similarity of the phrases used in clinical trial with patents and vice versa revealed that 39.15% of the terms used in patents were also used in these papers. In other words, 39.15% of the terms of patents were similar to the ones used in papers of clinical trial. This was while only 5.31% of the terms in these papers were the same terms used in patent papers. Conclusion: The accessibility of a document will increase its application and its visibility. In other words, it can be inferred that technology is affected by science. In general, in dental implants field, the path to science and technology is interconnected, and there is a direct relationship between them; however this is a two-way relationship, but technology has more influence on science.