Transparency of the dental literature: Research Protocol

Background: Open access articles, data and code sharing, funding and conflicts of interestdisclosures and detailed descriptions of materials, methods and results are greatfacilitators to open science. Objective: We aim to assess the use of transparency indicators (data availability, codeavailability, statements of protocol registration and conflicts of interest and fundingdisclosures) from open access articles published in dental journals available from theEurope PubMed Central (PMC) database. We will map transparency in dental articlesacross different journals, publication years, publishers, specialities and journal impactfactors.Methods: We will search and export all open access articles from PubMed-indexed dentaljournals available in the Europe PMC database. We will detect transparency indicators witha validated and automated tool developed to extract the indicators from the downloadedarticles. Basic journal- and article-related information will be retrieved from the PMCdatabase. We will use R for the searches (europepmc package), data handling, analysis(rtransparent package) and reporting (ggplot2 package).Discussion: Our results will establish the current state of dental research reportingtransparency and may indicate areas for improvement as well as specific steps orrequirements to ensure reporting transparency. This would influence both scientists' andthe public's perception of the credibility of results published in peer-reviewed journals.