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Probably, this has been due to the difficulties posed by recalling this information. Science today is becoming steadily more multidisciplinary, so that a global analysis of scientific output in Dentistry demands the consideration not only of publications in the DOSM but also of journals not included in this category. The present study proposes a specific strategy for the retrieval of this information by providing an overview of world dental scientific output and productivity by specialties and countries over the last three decades and could be used to identify the most productive research lines or the ones with greatest impact. In addition, to analyse publications outside DOSM is useful not only for their quantitative importance (number of articles) but also for their qualitative value, since it enables the identification of themes of interest outside the area and multidisciplinary teams that could have great promise in paradigm shifts. The analysis of this, and of other indicators of collaboration and the influence of institutional funding on the quality of the publications, will be the aim of future studies by our group.The allocation of papers to subject areas in bibliometrically driven studies is often based simply on journals in which they are published. This approach is not free of criticism and has now effectively been superseded by methods based on analysis also of title words, offering a far more accurate classification, with precision and retrieval often exceeding 90 % in some biomedical sub-fields. In our case, we have designed a mixed strategy combining the thematic search with the institutional one for the recall of the output published in Non-DOSM journals.However, the interpretation of the results of this bibliometric study should take into account a number of potential limitations. The most remarkable that may have affected the search strategy is associated with the selection and the subsequent assignation to specialties of the terms MeSH. The searches may underestimate the actual dental literature in Non-DOSM categories.