About Translational Dental Research

Translational Dental Research

Overview and identity

Translational Dental Research, abbreviated TDR, is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, open-access journal established in 2025, based in Xi'an, Shaanxi, China. It carries ISSN 2950-3485 and is published through KeAi Communications, with publishing services provided by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. Copyright in the journal is held by the Hospital of Stomatology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, which owns the journal; its editorial office can be reached at tdr@mail.xjtu.edu.cn.

The journal is sponsored by Xi'an Jiaotong University and co-organised by three of the university's units: the Hospital of Stomatology of Xi'an Jiaotong University, the School of Life Science and Technology of Xi'an Jiaotong University, and the Periodicals Publishing House of Xi'an Jiaotong University. That combination — a specialist dental hospital, a life-science and technology school, and a university publishing house — reflects the journal's subject: the movement of research out of the laboratory and into dental practice.

A first journal for translational dental medicine

TDR is described by its editors as the first specialised international journal dedicated to translational dental medicine. Translational research is the work of converting basic discoveries into usable treatments, devices and procedures, and then testing and refining them in clinical settings. In dentistry, that pipeline has historically been served by general dentistry journals, materials journals and clinical titles, rather than by a journal whose sole remit is translation itself.

The journal focuses on interdisciplinary research in the fields of stomatology — the science of the mouth and its diseases — and science and engineering, including theoretical innovation, technological breakthroughs, research and development, and transformation achievements that drive advancements in dental science. The phrase transformation achievements, a direct rendering of a common Chinese research-policy term, signals the journal's interest in the full pathway from discovery to application, including the stage at which a laboratory result becomes a product, a clinical protocol or a standard of care.

Scope: technology, drugs, materials and instruments

TDR welcomes submissions of basic research, applied research and clinical research related to the technology, methods, drugs, consumables, instruments and equipment in the field of dentistry. That list deliberately spans the whole material basis of dental practice: diagnostic and therapeutic technologies and methods; pharmaceuticals used in oral care; the consumables used in everyday procedures; and the instruments and larger equipment, from handpieces to imaging and digital-manufacturing systems, on which modern dentistry depends.

Beyond laboratory and clinical studies, the journal's remit as recorded in its founding descriptions includes policy and development-strategy analysis for the field. A translational journal has reason to cover that ground: whether a new dental material, drug or device reaches patients depends not only on its scientific merit but also on regulation, manufacturing, reimbursement and professional adoption, and the journal provides a venue where those questions can be examined alongside the underlying science.

Article types

The journal accepts a wide variety of article types: Research Paper, Review Paper, Short Communication, Case Report, Practice Guidelines, Consensus, Editorial, Opinion Paper, Perspective, Commentary and Meta-analysis. Its Guide for Authors defines the main categories. A Research Paper is a complete report on original research and/or clinical studies, describing in detail original and important work in the fields covered by the journal, with a structured abstract and a structure running from Introduction through Material and Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusions, together with authors' contributions, an ethics statement, conflict-of-interest disclosure, acknowledgements, bibliography, highlights and a graphical abstract.

A Review Paper is a substantial overview of original research, giving a succinct account of a particular topic, usually with a comprehensive bibliography and a table of contents. A Short Communication is a short report or announcement of research presenting original and significant material for rapid dissemination, expected to have a higher-than-average impact rather than reporting incremental research. Case Reports are brief reports of individual patients or small cohorts reporting novel findings of unexpected clinical significance. Guidelines, which apply to clinical medicine only, are documents that have been locally or internationally approved and contain general principles that may benefit others in their clinical practice or in writing their own guidelines, while Consensus pieces are evidence-based analyses that integrate findings, ideas and conceptual frameworks from a variety of sources in a clear and balanced way. Perspectives may focus on current advances and future directions in translational dental medicine and are more forward-looking and speculative than reviews, while Commentaries analyse recently published articles of particular interest.

Ethics and reporting standards

Because TDR publishes human and animal research, its author guidance sets detailed ethical requirements. Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must include a statement on ethics approval and consent, even where the need for approval was waived, together with the name of the approving ethics committee and its reference number where appropriate. Work involving human subjects must be carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, and manuscripts must state that procedures complied with relevant laws and institutional guidelines and that informed consent was obtained.

The journal will not accept manuscripts containing data derived from unethically sourced organs or tissue, including from executed prisoners or prisoners of conscience, and authors of transplantation research must declare that consent free from coercion was obtained and that organs or tissues were not so sourced. Animal experiments should comply with the ARRIVE guidelines and with applicable national and European rules on animal research, with the sex of animals indicated. All submissions to KeAi journals are automatically screened using iThenticate's CrossCheck to detect overlapping and similar text, and authors must disclose financial and personal relationships that could bias their work, using a structured declaration of interest, and may declare any use of generative AI in the writing process under the journal's policy.

Open access and publication charges

TDR is a fully open-access journal owned by the Hospital of Stomatology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, which retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and compiled issues. Individual articles are universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format, immediately after publication. Peer review is conducted under the responsibility of the Editorial Office of Translational Dental Research at the hospital.

The open-access publication fee, or article processing charge, is USD 1,000 plus taxes. All article processing charges for articles submitted to the journal before 31 December 2027 will be fully waived. The journal is published quarterly, and its first volume appeared in 2025, with Volume 1, Issue 2 published that year carrying the journal's ISSN on its cover and its articles distributed through ScienceDirect.

The sponsoring hospital

The journal's owner and lead co-organiser, the Hospital of Stomatology of Xi'an Jiaotong University, is a National Health Commission-affiliated tertiary Grade-A stomatological hospital — the top grade in China's hospital classification system — and is described by the university as the only such NHC-affiliated specialist hospital in Northwest China, integrating medical services, education, research and preventive care. It serves as a specialised training centre for stomatology in Northwest China, a continuing medical education base, a national base for the testing of stomatological practitioners and the training of examiners, and the home of the Shaanxi Clinical Research Centre of Dental and Maxillofacial Diseases.

The hospital's institutional history reaches back to a dental specialty clinic established in 1950 at the affiliated hospital of the National Northwest Medical College. The Department of Stomatology was approved by the Ministry of Health in 1975, the Affiliated Stomatological Hospital was established in 1985, and the College of Stomatology followed in 1991. When Xi'an Medical University merged with Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2000, the institution took its present university name, adding the College of Stomatology name in 2012. The hospital reports having undertaken 368 scientific research programmes, including projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National High-tech R&D Program (863 Program), and it maintains a stomatology research centre and platforms in cell and molecular biology, histopathology and 3D digital diagnosis — exactly the kind of infrastructure on which translational dental research depends.

Xi'an Jiaotong University context

Xi'an Jiaotong University, the journal's sponsor, is one of China's major research universities, founded in 1896. Its School of Life Science and Technology, a co-organiser of the journal, supplies the basic-science and bioengineering side of the translational partnership, while its Periodicals Publishing House supplies professional journal-publishing capacity within the university. The journal's editorial office email domain and its contact address both sit within the university, keeping editorial operations close to the clinical and laboratory groups whose work the journal publishes.

Xi'an itself is a significant centre for dental education and research in western China, home both to Xi'an Jiaotong University's stomatology hospital and college and to other major stomatological institutions. A journal based there, published in English and distributed globally through Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform, gives that research community a dedicated international outlet in its own specialty.

Publisher context

TDR is published through KeAi Communications, a Beijing-based joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier and repurposed in 2013 as an open-access journal publishing service provider. KeAi has developed a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals across all scientific disciplines, using Elsevier platforms and production systems to distribute Chinese-rooted international journals worldwide.

Within that system, Translational Dental Research occupies a precise niche: a 2025 launch, quarterly, English-language and fully open access, owned by a specialist university hospital, and claiming a first-of-its-kind remit in translational dental medicine. Its success will be judged by whether researchers in biomaterials, oral biology, digital dentistry and clinical stomatology come to treat it as the natural home for work whose purpose is to change what happens in the dental clinic.