Jersey Choice Top Dentists: How Voting Works & How to Win

614 dentists, 11 specialties, and zero public ballot

614. That's how many dentists New Jersey Monthly currently names to Jersey Choice Top Dentists, spread across 11 specialties statewide. No public ballot produced that number. Practicing dentists chose it, asked a single question: which colleagues would you personally send your own family to.

That's worth stating plainly before anything else on this page. A reader arriving here looking for a "vote for my dentist" link won't find one, because none exists. The magazine's own mechanic runs entirely through peer input, not reader clicks, which puts Jersey Choice Top Dentists in a different category from most of the readers-choice programs covered elsewhere on this site.

Results publish annually in the magazine's July issue, then live on as a searchable directory at njmonthly.com/find-a-dentist/. A practice checking whether it made this year's list should look there directly rather than rely on a prior year's printed page.

How this differs from New Jersey's public-vote ballots

New Jersey Monthly itself runs a second program under a similar name, and confusing the two costs a practice real clarity. The Jersey Choice Restaurant Poll asks readers to vote each February across North, Central, and South regional ballots. Jersey Choice Top Dentists asks dentists to name dentists, with no reader voting step anywhere in the process.

The Best of New Jersey and Best of Jersey Shore Contest readers-choice programs sit in that same public-vote category, open to consumer input across many kinds of businesses at once. A dental practice weighing marketing around any of these three names needs three different playbooks, not one script that happens to work everywhere.

How the peer survey itself actually runs

New Jersey Monthly polls practicing dentists across the state, asking a specific, personal question: which colleagues would you trust enough to send your own family to. That framing matters. It isn't "who's the most famous" or "who advertises the most." It's one professional recommending another under conditions closer to a private referral than a popularity contest.

What isn't published about the survey's own methodology

How many dentists were actually surveyed, what response rate the magazine got, and exactly how responses get weighted into a final list of 614 names across 11 specialties: none of that appears in the sources reviewed for this page. New Jersey Monthly publishes the result, not the underlying process in granular detail.

Results land twice a year in practice: once in the magazine's July print issue, and continuously afterward at njmonthly.com/find-a-dentist/, which functions as an ongoing searchable directory rather than a one-time announcement page.

New Jersey's dental profession, spread statewide

Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken anchor the state's northern, most densely practiced corridor, where a specialist's referral network can cross several towns in a single afternoon. Princeton and Morristown carry their own concentrated, affluent patient bases further inland, distinct from the northern urban corridor in both patient demographics and practice size.

Cherry Hill and Trenton represent the state's center, closer to Philadelphia's orbit than to New York's, with their own separate referral circles. Toms River, along the shore, draws from a patient base that shifts seasonally, a dynamic the northern and central practices generally don't share.

None of that geography changes how Jersey Choice Top Dentists gets decided; the survey covers the whole state at once, not region by region. It matters for a different reason: a dentist's actual referral network, the thing the peer survey is really measuring, tends to cluster around exactly these kinds of regional lines, not a flat statewide average.

What actually helps a practice here, since a vote drive can't

A practice can't buy, campaign for, or otherwise manufacture inclusion on Jersey Choice Top Dentists, because the underlying decision never touches a public ballot. Money spent on a patient-facing "vote for us" push here is money spent on a process that doesn't exist, and framing it that way to patients risks looking uninformed to the exact professional community the survey polls.

What actually moves the needle sits outside anything a vote-promotion service can offer: genuine peer standing, referral relationships with other dentists, visibility within local and state dental society circles, and the kind of clinical reputation that leads a colleague to name a specific peer unprompted. None of that is purchasable the way a readers-choice vote count is.

For New Jersey businesses that do run on a public ballot, the mechanics differ meaningfully. How online contest votes work and award vote campaign planning apply directly to programs like the Jersey Choice Restaurant Poll or Best of New Jersey, just not to this one. Anyone weighing a promotional spend on any New Jersey program should read is buying votes legal first, if only to see why that question doesn't even apply to a peer-nominated list like this.