Introduction

The participation of students in scientific events constitutes a form of preparing them in research methods and promoting the preparation in order to channel their scientific concerns.

Objective

To analyse the participation of the undergraduate students from Cuban universities in the 4th Ibero Latin American Meeting of Dental Students.

Method

A descriptive bibliometric study was performed with the 40 studies presented in the event by 34 students. The studied variables were: origin of centre, year of the career, study type, literature references, current relevance of the bibliography according to the index of Price, languages of the bibliographical references, and research topic.

Results

Of the participating students, 11 were from the Havana Medical Sciences University, and 8 from its homonym in Camagüey. There was a predominance of 4th year students (11/34), as well as of research works (20/40). Case reports were the studies less represented (10.0%). The range of references for research work varied between 15.75 and 21.00. The arithmetic mean for this indicator was 17.45. The index of Price oscillated between 0.34 and 0.52, with a mean value of 0.38. Of the 698 cited references, 481 (68.91%) were in the Spanish language, 30.23% in English, and 6 (0.86%) in Portuguese. “Dentistry” and “dental caries” were the most mentioned keywords.

Conclusions

The most represented University of Medical Sciences was Havana. There was a predominance of 4th year students, research works, bibliographical references in Spanish language, as well as the investigations related to maxillofacial surgery, Primary Health Care, and Periodontics.