Evidence-Based Decision-Making: An Overview

The hall of periodontal surgical procedures has been constantly amplified since the mid-1950s by the development of techniques, biomaterials and the knowledge retrieved by basic/clinical research acquired, in order to combine the advantages of function’s reestablishment with improvement of aesthetics. A single search of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, US National Library of Medicine database (PubMed) using the terms “periodontal surgery” provides access to more than 14,000 publications. Such a huge amount of references regards to all types of study designs; all of them presented together and without ranking the quality of information. As a result, the decision-making process may be jeopardized when low-quality data are erroneously used to guide a treatment plan.