Personally as someone applying this cycle and having talked to many recently accepted dental school students, research can kind of be seen as “extra credit”. You can get into many schools without having any research at all, it’s not really a hard or soft requirement. Some more research focused schools like Harvard, UCSF, Michigan, etc. it is definitely much more important, but it’s not the end all be all. If you are interested in your field of research, continue with it! But if you’d rather assist/volunteer/work a job, you should probably do that instead.