Who’s on First?

With the baseball season in full swing, the daily sports sections are full of the usual array of statistics that are intended to reflect the prowess of batters and pitchers in the league. Fans will scour these data to assess the form of their favorite players, their team, or their fantasy league roster. Relatively little attention is paid to team batting or pitching performance. Although the teams’ averages are typically published on a weekly basis, far greater attention is directed to the performance of the individual. It is curious that when it comes to evaluating scientific journals, the reverse is true. Most of the attention is directed to the team batting average, or Impact Factor. The Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. It is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to articles published in that journal during the previous 2 years. 1 Much has been written about the use and misuse of the Impact Factor in evaluating journals, faculty, and institutions. 2 British universities are currently being evaluated as part of the government’s Research Assessment Exercise. Tremendous emphasis will be placed on the caliber of journals in which the faculty members publish. This may have relatively little to do with the quality or impact of a given paper. For example, Impact Factors can conceal large differences in citation rates for different articles in the same journal. 2 In essence, the Impact Factor simply reflects the ability of journals and editors to attract the best papers available. 1 In the most recent Impact Factors, Optometry and Vision Science has again risen in stature. Our rating has improved to 0.482, up from 0.124 five years ago. More importantly, we are now the top ranked optometry journal. To mark the occasion, the Editorial Office decided to compile a list of our 10 most frequently cited papers. Using the Institute for Scientific Information ’s database, we identified the 10 most frequently cited articles published in Optometry and Vision Science, and its predecessor, the American Journal of Optometry and Physiological Optics. Our analysis is not without limitations. For example, it does not take into account citations before 1981, a factor that will have handicapped older articles. Likewise, more recently published papers have not had much time to be cited. Given these constraints, it is not surprising that the most recent paper to make the Top Ten was published in 1986 and most of those on the list were published in the early ’80s. The oldest paper to make our Top Ten is Heath’s 1956 paper on the relation between visual acuity and accommodative accuracy. 3 Published long before the advent of laser and infrared optometers, the paper has clearly stood the test of time. Owens and Leibowitz’s paper on a similar topic—accommodation, convergence, and distance perception in low illumination—also makes the list. 4 This was one of a collection of papers to generate tremendous interest in tonic accommodation, or the resting focus, and its relation to night driving difficulties and refractive error development. Marron and Bailey’s 1982 paper was also something of a trailblazer. 5 They were among the first to correlate clinical visual tests with functional measures, in their case the ability of low vision patients to achieve successful orientation and mobility. The journal has a strong tradition of publishing papers on infant vision and papers on this topic are well represented on the list. 6–8 Howland’s 1985 paper discusses the optics of photorefraction, a principle that has recently been incorporated into commercially available vision screening instruments. Gwiazda et al. 6 and McDonald et al. 8 both describe the measurement of infant visual acuity using the preferential looking method. The latter paper represents some of the first published data using the acuity card procedure. Design an instrument, develop a technique, or simply be the first to evaluate a new commercially available device and you may guarantee yourself a lifetime of citations. Many of the papers in the Top Ten fall into this category 8–12 and McBrien and Millodot’s 1985 paper evaluating the Canon R-1 autorefractor is a good example. This device became the instrument of choice for many subsequent studies of ocular accommodation. Likewise, Grolman’s 1972 paper describes development and evaluation of the non-contact tonometer. Although the device did not become the gold standard for intraocular pressure measurement, it still plays an important role in screening for ocular hypertension and glaucoma. The two most cited papers in the history of the journal describe new charts for vision testing. Ginsburg’s 1984 paper introduced the Vistech Contrast Sensitivity Chart. 11 Although it has been superseded by other printed contrast sensitivity tests, the Vistech chart brought contrast sensitivity out of the laboratory and into the consulting room. By far the most cited work published in Optometry and Vision Science is the paper describing the Bailey-Lovie logMAR Visual Acuity Chart. 10 Bailey and Lovie’s paper took a technique which had remained unchanged for decades and made a series of landmark improvements. Anyone who reads the paper can’t help but wonder why nobody had thought of it before. Along with the derivative ETDRS chart, the Bailey-Lovie chart has become the standard for visual acuity measurement in clinical research, hence the large number of citations. Looking ahead, it is tempting to speculate how papers published in the last decade will fare in the future. Expanding the above list to 30 still only yields 4 papers that were published since the journal’s name change in 1989. They represent the journal’s traditional strengths, which include refractive error, visual assessment, and infant vision and I anticipate that papers in these areas will continue to be among the most cited. Nonetheless, as the Editorial Board strives to increase further the impact of Optometry and Vision Science, I hope that we can focus on both the excellence of individual papers as well as our team batting average. College of Optometry Columbus, Ohio