“…This scientific method was initiated in Dentistry by Richard Niederman and his research team (Niederman & Badovinac, 1999;Sun et al, 2000;Kim et al, 2001;Yang et al, 2001) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. From then on, with increasing emphasis on the number of citations of a given paper, which has been considered one of the measures of scientific merit (Eyre-Walker & Stoletzki, 2013;Shekhani et al, 2017), special attention has been placed on citation analysis to recognize the contributing journals (Ahmad et al, 2019;Perazzo et al, 2019), researchers (Santos et al, 2021), as well as the current status and research trends in different dental specialties (Faggion Jr et al, 2017;Tarazona et al, 2018), thematic fields (Adnan & Ullah, 2018;Baldiotti et al, 2021) and materials (Lorusso et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2021).…”