Challenges and opportunities for dental research in India

India has about 260 dental colleges with a workforce of more than 11000 teaching faculty, an intake of more than 1750 Postgraduate students per year and produces approximately 17000 dental graduates per year to cater to the dental needs of the population. Thus India has a great potential to contribute to dental research. Despite this huge number of patients and dental workforce our representation in dental research committees and peer reviewed indexed dental literature is negligible. Objectives: i) to identify the challenges and opportunities for dental research among dental faculty and postgraduate students in India; and ii) investigate differences in opinion by occupational category (specialist faculty; non-specialist faculty; and postgraduate students). Methods: A self administered questionnaire was distributed among a convenience sample of faculty and postgraduates in various Indian dental colleges. The data were analyzed using SPSS for Windows (Version 15.0) and the results were expressed as frequency and percentage. Chi square tests were used to investigate statistical differences by occupational category. Results: Of all respondents, 80.4% believed that research is important for dentistry in India but 67.3% postgraduates and 54.2% dental faculty did not get funding to initiate research. Although 85.0% of all the respondents thought that publishing is important, 28% postgraduates and 33.4% faculty members reported poor inter-departmental co-ordination as a hurdle to research publication. 47.0% of dental faculty believed that even though the quality of their scientific work is good, it is not accepted in international journals because the editorial board is unfair to Indian authors where as only 29.6% postgraduates thought this. These differences in opinion by occupational categories are statistically significant (P<0.001). 79.1% of all respondents reported poor documentation and record maintenance as a major hurdle for research in India.Conclusions: The results indicate some of the barriers to conducting dental research in India.