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Abstract
Background: Master’s degrees are developed to encourage pursuing high-level knowledge. Their creation promotes national and personal growth and development. Purpose: To describe postdoctoral master’s degrees in dentistry, which are offered worldwide and in Colombia. Methods: This descriptive study looked for the terms maestría, master, master degree, magister AND odontologia, dental, and dentistry in the databases PubMed, SciELO, and Google Scholar. Variables analyzed were program name, continent, country, university, and field of emphasis. The search was conducted between September and December 2012. Central tendency measures and proportions were calculated for quantitative and qualitative variables respectively. Results: 289 master’s programs in dentistry were found in 130 institutions of higher education. Europe was the continent with the largest proportion of programs. Colombia had a very low number of this type of postdoctoral degree when compared to Brazil and Mexico, 32% of programs were named as Master of Dentistry and 82% had an emphasis on clinical practice. Conclusion: Until the date of data collection for this project, Colombia had fewer master’s programs in dentistry when compared to countries like Brazil, Mexico and Chile. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the creation of master’s degrees in which research addresses the dental health epidemiological trends.
KEYWORDS
dental education; dentistry; universities
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