Primary Dental Care 1994–2004: The First Ten Years a Chronology

Abstract

The prime purpose of a professional journal is to keep its readers informed of changes of importance affecting the practise of that profession. That is the criterion that I have applied in producing this chronology of the papers that have been published in Primary Dental Care during the past decade.

The ambition which has guided me since I received the invitation to carry out this review is a simple one: to include as much as may generally be found useful by general dental practitioners (GDPs), who form the bulk of our readership.

In 1789 the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham extolled the virtues of utility for mankind when he declared that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation’. The contributors that I have included, by contrast, think of their utilitarianism as striving after the most practical. The principal purpose of this chronology is to achieve a summary, without weighing causes or consequences. From past experience, an outstanding virtue of such an aggregated record is that it can inspire fresh patterns of thought and thus encourage the submission of manuscripts as a result of those thoughts. I can think of scarcely any facet of the general practice of dentistry that has not been touched upon, for the most part authoritatively. I hope that these brief aide-memoires may persuade old readers to return to those articles of particular interest to them and that new readers will feel informed about past papers.

Every issue of the journal to date has been reviewed. Dates, volume and issue numbers and principal authors’ names are all included. With these identifying features any paper, to which reference is made, may be quickly found. It would be manifestly absurd to use precious space on a formal listing of more than 250 references and this listing has, therefore, been omitted.