Tag Archives: osseointegrated dental implants

Wire arc additive manufacturing applied to cosmetic dentistry?

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photograph of a flower for decorative purposes onlyLast weekend I sat down at my laptop to write this week’s post with only a vague idea of a topic. When I opened my laptop I was surprised to see two emails from a supposedly reputable commercial publisher inviting me to be a guest editor for two special issues of two different journals.  For two decades, I served as editor-in-chief of two international journals consecutively with only a short overlap so I am well-qualified to act as a guest editor.  However, the invitations related to cosmetic dentistry and wire arc additive manufacturing.  I know almost nothing about these two subjects so why was I receiving invitations from the editors of two journals to be a guest editor.  In collaboration with colleagues, I have published some papers recently on another form of additive manufacturing [see ‘If you don’t succeed try and try again‘ on September 29th 2021].  My Google Scholar profile shows that my two most highly cited papers relate to work performed thirty years ago on osseointegrated dental implants [see ‘Turning the screw in dentistry‘ on September 30th, 2020]; although on closer examination it would also reveal that I have published nothing since then on this subject.  I suspect that a poorly programmed algorithm was fooled by my eclectic and long publication record into issuing poorly targeted invitations rather than the academic editors exercising poor judgment.  At least, I hope that is what happened since the alternative is that journal editors are no longer exercising academic judgment (though it is obvious this is also happening given the incoherent reviews of manuscripts that editors too frequently pass on to authors probably without reading them).  I will treat these invitations as spam; however, others may see them as opportunities to create or expand ‘peer-review’ rings and put more ‘Rotten eggs in the store‘ [see post on November 30th, 2022].  The peer-review and publication system for scientific papers is clearly broken and one part of the solution is to remove commercial interests from the process.

Turning the screw in dentistry

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Dental implant surgery showing implant being screwed into placeTwo weeks ago, I wrote about supervising PhD students and my own PhD thesis [‘35 years later and still working on a PhD thesis‘ on September 16th, 2020].  The tedium of collecting data as a PhD student without digital instrumentation stimulated me to work subsequently on automation in experimental mechanics which ultimately led to projects like INSTRUCTIVE and DIMES.  In INSTRUCTIVE we developed  low-cost digital sensors for tracking damage in components; while in DIMES we are transitioning the technology into the industrial environment using tests on full-scale aircraft systems as demonstrators.  However, my research in automating and digitising measurements in experimental mechanics has not generated my most cited publications; instead, my two most cited papers describe the development and application of results in my PhD thesis to osseointegrated dental implants.  One, published in 1994, describes the ‘Tightening characteristics for screwed joints in osseointegrated dental implants‘; while, the other published two years earlier provides a ‘Theoretical analysis of the fatigue life of fixture screws in osseointegrated dental implants‘.  In other words, the former tells you how to tighten the screws so that the implants do not come loose and the latter how long the screws will survive before they need to be replaced – both quite useful pieces of information for dentists which perhaps explains their continued popularity.

Statistics footnote: my two most cited papers received five times as many citations in the last 18 months and also since publication than the most popular paper from my PhD thesis. The details of the three papers are given below:

Burguete, R.L., Johns, R.B., King, T. and Patterson, E.A., 1994. Tightening characteristics for screwed joints in osseointegrated dental implants. Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, 71(6), pp.592-599.

Patterson, E.A. and Johns, R.B., 1992. Theoretical analysis of the fatigue life of fixture screws in osseointegrated dental implants. The International journal of oral & maxillofacial implants, 7(1), p.26.

Kenny, B. and Patterson, E.A., 1985. Load and stress distribution in screw threads. Experimental Mechanics, 25(3), pp.208-213.

Logos of Clean Sky 2 and EUThe INSTRUCTIVE and DIMES projects have received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No. 685777 and No. 820951 respectively.

The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Image by володимир волощак from Pixabay.