When I teach evidence-based dentistry, I often recall one clinical case from dental school. A partial denture patient came to me with a loose denture that needed to be replaced. As a student, I followed my clinical supervisors’ instructions and the textbooks meticulously to make a new denture. The patient hated the final result. This led to awkward tension between my supervisor and the patient, who had very different views on the denture. After some back and forth, my supervisor told me angrily, “The patient is wrong. Why are you listening to him? I tell you, this is how it is done.”

The situation never sat right with me. Years later, I realised that the aspects my supervisor insisted upon were based on limited evidence. The case was an example of my early struggles to understand how to integrate patient views, clinical experience, and research evidence. Joining the evidence-based health care community became my way of answering that challenge.

In 1998, Derek Richards and Alan Lawrence in 19981 wrote in one of the early editorials,

“This approach [referring to evidence based dentistry] needs to take place not only amongst the ranks of the post graduates but equally importantly in the dental schools. The pressure of practice tends to get dentists to switch off the ‘learn mode’ but there is a need to switch on ‘learn mode’ again. The experience in Canada that evidence-based doctors are happier doctors and transferring this satisfying effective practice to dentistry can be a market asset in the new world of dentistry.”

I can’t speak for all dentists, but I was definitely a happier dentist when I learned about evidence-based dentistry.

In 2011, Professor Elizabeth Kay offered me a position as a lecturer in Evidence-Based Dentistry at Peninsula Dental School, with a vision on how we can make dentistry more evidence-based and patient-centred, a vision she carried forward as Editor of this journal. I am honoured to take over from her, now as a Professor in Clinical Epidemiology and Oral Health Research at the University of Plymouth, and to continue her legacy.

In her first Editorial in 2019, Elizabeth Kay spoke about “bridging the gap”2 between research and clinical practice. She reminded us that dentistry demands a unique range of skills from technical expertise, people skills, composure under pressure and business management and that we need to develop evidence on diverse questions and uncertainties we face. We have been slow in bridging the gap. This is not unique to dentistry. Alessandro Liberati, a year before his life was cut short, reflected on his different roles as a researcher, as a person who was responsible for allocating funding for research, and as an individual who had multiple myeloma. He highlighted how little research had progressed around the gaps in the effectiveness of interventions in multiple myeloma in a decade3.

One initiative that I worked with Liz illustrates an approach to bridge the gap: rapid reviews commissioned by the British Dental Association and Shirley Glasstone Hughes Trust4. The process began with primary care dentists identifying priority topics, followed by rapid reviews of evidence, and then commissioning new research where gaps existed. As a junior academic then, I was surprised that the prioritised questions were not all clinical, as I had expected, but also addressed wellbeing and sustainability. We need more initiatives like this in our research system.

Beyond dentistry, major initiatives have been reshaping how we approach research:

  • The REWARD (REduce research Waste And Reward Diligence) initiative, [https://www.thelancet.com/campaigns/efficiency] launched by The Lancet in 2014, aims to reduce waste and maximise the value of research.

  • The Cochrane Priority Setting Methods Group [https://methods.cochrane.org/prioritysetting/] that focuses on developing methods and guidance around methods for research priority setting or developing a research agenda

  • The Evidence-Based Research Network [https://ebrnetwork.org/] that promotes two major values: (a) no new research studies without prior systematic reviews of existing evidence; (b) efficient production, updating and accessibility of systematic reviews

  • The James Lind Alliance [https://www.jla.nihr.ac.uk/] that brings patients, carers, and clinicians together to identify and prioritise unanswered questions that they agree are the most important, so that research funders are aware of the issues that matter most to them.

We have made progress, but we have a long way to go to bridge the gap, and I think we, as dentists and dental researchers, need to do even more to address the specific challenges of our own discipline to bridge the gap. However, the first step is to be open to challenging what we think we know about dentistry.

My predecessor, Professor Elizabeth Kay, took a key step toward addressing this gap by broadening the journal’s scope to include systematic reviews, methodological studies, and feasibility studies. This created a stronger foundation for translating research into practice. Building on that vision, I intend to champion patient-centred and evidence-based research that directly informs important clinical questions. Research that not only answers “what works,” but also reflects the realities, priorities, and values of those delivering and receiving dental care.