Background Papers

National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) Strategic Plan

The NIDCR recently updated its strategic plan, originally formulated in 1997. This update has been developed in 2002/2003. The plan provides background information on the NIDCR, outlines its mission and vision, and reviews some of the results of past investments in oral and craniofacial research. It describes challenges for the future, the burden of oral diseases on the U.S., and discusses infrastructure needs. Strategic initiatives are grouped into research opportunities, research capacity and communication.

Dental Informatics: An Emerging Biomedical Informatics Discipline

Biomedical informatics is a maturing discipline. During the last 40 years, it has developed into a research discipline of significant scale and scope. One of its subdisciplines, dental informatics, is beginning to emerge as its own entity. While there is a growing cadre of trained dental informaticians, dental faculty and administrators in general are not very familiar with dental informatics as an area of scientific inquiry. Many confuse informatics with information technology (IT), are unaware of its scientific methods and principles, and cannot relate dental informatics to biomedical informatics as a whole. This paper delineates informatics from information technology, and explains the types of scientific questions that dental and other informaticians typically engage in. Scientific investigation in informatics centers primarily on model formulation, system development, system implementation and the study of effects. Informatics draws its scientific methods mainly from information science, computer science, cognitive science and telecommunications. Dental informatics shares many types of research questions and methods with its parent discipline, biomedical informatics. However, there are indications that certain research questions in dental informatics require novel solutions that have not yet been developed in other informatics fields.

Dental and Craniofacial Research (; 316 K)

This report describes current and future research issues in dental and craniofacial research. A thorough understanding of research problems is useful to identify informatics approaches that could best help solve them. The paper addresses basic, clinical and translational research. (This report is copyrighted by the American Dental Association, and posted here with permission. The complete report on the Future of Dentistry is available from the .)

American Dental Association (ADA) Research Agenda 2002

A list of dental research issues of importance to the practicing dentist developed by the American Dental Association.