Leading research on jaw disorders has a major impact worldwide

“It's fantastic to receive confirmation that the research conducted at our faculty has a significant international impact and is being put to good use in the work carried out by our colleagues around the world,” says Professor Birgitta Häggman-Henrikson, who is based at the Faculty of Odontology.

This is also a good sign that internationally leading researchers not only want to collaborate with us but also want to be directly involved in our research environment.

Birgitta Häggman-Henrikson

The study was conducted by researchers at Chinese institutions. In their work, they reviewed more than 3,000 scientific articles and publications on orofacial pain written between 2000 to 2024, in nearly 90 countries. Orofacial pain refers to chronic pain in the jaws and facial region.

The results show that Malmö University ranks third—after the universities of São Paulo in Brazil and Aarhus in Denmark. At the same time, Malmö University has had the second highest number of citations in the world after the Danish University during the same period – where both Scandinavian institutions have had an average of nearly 50 citations per publication. The corresponding figure for the University of São Paulo in Brazil is just under 20 citations.

“This shows that we are at the absolute forefront when it comes to identifying relevant research questions, and that our studies are of very high quality and cited by others,” says Häggman-Henrikson.

The analysis also highlights that the Faculty of Odontology is successful in attracting world-class expertise and collaborations. Two researchers highlighted in the study as the most cited and influential in the field are Peter Svensson and Frank Lobbezzo – the former having previously been a visiting professor at Malmö University, while the latter currently holds a similar position.

“This is also a good sign that internationally leading researchers not only want to collaborate with us but also want to be directly involved in our research environment,” adds Häggman-Henrikson.

Among the 25 publications ranked as having the highest citation frequency are also several works authored at the Faculty of Odontology. Behind these are Häggman-Henrikson, one of the leaders of the advancing oral health research profile, Thomas List and Per Alstergren.

The article also notes that research in this field has increased significantly over the past fifteen years and that nearly 300 scientific articles are now published annually worldwide. The authors therefore argue that research into orofacial pain should be seen as a separate interdisciplinary field rather than a sub-discipline of dentistry or general pain research.

Read the article by researchers at Chinese institutions, published in Frontiers in Neurology.