Background: This scoping review examined research on artificial intelligence (AI) published in Korean academic journals in thefields of dental hygiene and dentistry. The Context–Concept–Maturity framework was applied to compare research trends and identify future directions. Methods: Following the Arksey and O’Malley framework, with extensions by Levac et al., the review adhered to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. Domestic academic journals published between January 1, 2020, and September 30, 2025, were searched in KISS, RISS, ScienceON, and DBpia. Studies were screened, extracted, and coded according to population, concept, and context criteria, yielding 70 eligible articles (26 in dental hygiene and 44 in dentistry). Results: In dental hygiene, most research focused on education (38.5%) and community/public oral health (38.5%), while clinicalapplications were limited (7.7%). Major conceptual domains included education/training tools (42.3%), workflow/automation (38.5%), prediction (15.4%), and classification (3.8%). Dentistry studies were predominantly clinically oriented and imagingbased, emphasizing classification, automation, and segmentation. Maturity analysis indicated that dentistry primarily occupied Stage 2 (application; ∼84.1%), whereas dental hygiene showed a dual distribution across Stage 1 (exploration; 46.2%) and Stage 2 (application; 46.2%), with limited Stage 3 (integration; 7.7%) studies. Conclusion AI research in Korea exhibits divergent developmental trajectories. Dental hygiene research emphasizes education,prevention, and public oral health, combining exploratory and applied approaches, while dentistry demonstrates greater clinical integration and application-level maturity. Advancing AI maturity in dental hygiene will require expansion of clinical data–driven studies, incorporation of AI and data literacy into curricula, standardized integration of unstructured and clinical data, multicenter long-term validation, and the development of ethical and performance governance frameworks.

Background: As a multidisciplinary field, dental hygiene has seen the emergence of novel research topics that have reshaped itsscholarly landscape during the pandemic. This study investigated the evolution of research themes and knowledge structures in the Journal of Dental Hygiene Science (JDHS) by comparing the pre-COVID-19 (2015∼2019) and post-COVID-19 (2020∼2024) periods. Methods: A total of 499 articles (319 from 2015∼2019 and 180 from 2020∼2024) published in JDHS were analyzed. Using NetMiner 5.0, meaningful keywords were extracted from titles, abstracts, and author keywords. Term frequency, term frequency-inverse document frequency, degree centrality, and betweenness centrality were examined. Topic modeling was conducted using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm. Results: During 2015∼2019, “student,” “stress,” “health,” and “tooth” showed high degree centrality, with eight topics identified:education and clinical practice satisfaction, oral health behaviors, job stress, teeth and oral tissues, professional identity, core competencies, preventive research, and factor analysis. In 2020∼2024, “tooth,” “work,” and “surface” demonstrated the highest degree centrality, with five reconfigured topics: dental hygienist competencies, infection control, biofilm and material-related experimental research, and oral health behaviors. Notably, “COVID-19,” “infection,” “control,” and “hand hygiene” emerged as an independent topic cluster. Across both periods, “health” and “dental hygienist” maintained high betweenness centrality, serving as bridging concepts across research domains. Conclusion Over the past decade, JDHS research has shifted from an education- and psychology-oriented focus to clinical andexperimental studies, with infection control emerging as an independent research theme after COVID-19. However, internationally prominent topics such as teledentistry and digital dentistry remain underrepresented, suggesting the need for expanded research in these emerging areas. This study provides quantitative evidence of structural changes in Korean dental hygiene research, offering insights to guide future research directions and journal development strategies.