Information technology in ophthalmology

Ophthalmology and its adnexal disciplines are in the grip of an explosion in information technology (IT), as are most branches of medicine. Not only do we have a bewildering number of published (on paper that is) periodicals, textbooks, and society (or faculty or college) newsletters to sift, select, and assimilate information from, but we now also have an increasing array of electronic sources of information.

Many peer reviewed journals (the BJO included) are now represented on the internet in world wide web (“web”) sites.1 Some of these contain full text and graphics articles whereas others offer samples of their content, or tables of contents. Inevitably, they almost always provide subscription information. Most usefully, the web sites usually provide the current instructions for authors. The internet addresses (uniform resource locators, URLs) of some ophthalmology journals are provided in Table1.

In addition to formal “publications”, there are many web sites which contain information that has not undergone peer review. Some of these web sites offer information about well established societies, faculties, or colleges. Examples of these are provided in Table 2. Others are sites of specific hospitals, laboratories, and even individual practitioners. These latter web sites are often advertisements for the services of the organisation or individual who runs the site and, as such, are publicity ventures and not necessarily rich or reliable sources of information. Web sites which are advertisements and publicity ventures for biomedical publishers, manufacturers, and traders also exist in abundance. The true nature of a web site is often not apparent until time has been expended, or wasted, in finding it and reading it.

A further type of site that can be very useful also exists. This type …