LAUSR

Given this year is the 100th anniversary of the launch of Clinical and Experimental Optometry, an interesting question to contemplate is: What are the most important papers published in the journal over the past century? Such a question is difficult to answer. Optometric practice and vision science evolve over time, and a paper that is very important in one era may be of little relevance in another era. As well, how can the level of importance of a paper be judged? A panel of representative clinicians and vision scientists could be assembled to contemplate this, but it would be an onerous, if not impossible task, given that over 10,000 items have been published in the journal over the past 100 years. Two developments this century can assist us in determining the most important papers published in the journal. First, bibliographic search engines have been developed which allow targeted electronic searching and generation of citation metrics. Second, all issues of Clinical and Experimental Optometry have been digitised, and our publisher, Wiley, can access data on the number of downloads of individual papers. Thus, two metrics that approximate to the ‘importance’ of papers can be generated – the number of times that papers are cited, and the number of times papers have been downloaded. As discussed below, these metrics – which perhaps reflect different aspects of ‘importance’ – are informative, but each have certain limitations.