Indian Journal of Ophthalmology

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Year
: 2009  |  Volume : 57  |  Issue : 1  |  Page : 77--78

AIOS proceedings: A response


Babu Rajendran 
 The Eye Research Foundation, Vijaya Hospital, 180 NSK Salai, Chennai, India

Correspondence Address:
Babu Rajendran
The Eye Research Foundation, Vijaya Hospital, 180 NSK Salai, Chennai
India




How to cite this article:
Rajendran B. AIOS proceedings: A response.Indian J Ophthalmol 2009;57:77-78


How to cite this URL:
Rajendran B. AIOS proceedings: A response. Indian J Ophthalmol [serial online] 2009 [cited 2024 Mar 29 ];57:77-78
Available from: https://journals.lww.com/ijo/pages/default.aspx/text.asp?2009/57/1/77/44511


Full Text

Dear Editor,

This is with reference to the article titled "An observational study of the proceedings of the All India Ophthalmological Conference, 2000 and subsequent publication in indexed journals" by Dhaliwal et al . [1] I would first like to congratulate and compliment the authors for this very innovative and eye-opening study.

However, because the basis of this study has been the abstracts book of the 2000 conference held in Chennai and its subsequent proceedings, I would like to state the following points. I was the chairman of the scientific committee for that conference, having taken up the post after the Kochi conference. Many new and innovative ideas were introduced during that scientific program, and the members were required to submit the full text of their articles before presentation.

Following the conference, the new editor of the proceedings informed me that he had received far less papers than that were presented at the conference (200 full texts against 278 abstracts as clearly noted by the authors). To rectify this situation, from the following year, the authors whose full texts were not received by a previously indicated deadline were not allowed to present their papers.

This increased the number of articles in the proceedings considerably. Soon after, the editor of the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology at that time had indicated that several good papers presented at the conference missed being published in the prestigious journal of the society. During the third year of my term at the Ahmedabad conference, we strictly followed the instruction about noninclusion of those without full text (both in hard copy and soft copy formats). Even though the names may not have appeared in the abstracts book, the final papers presented were listed in the ready reckoner. The soft copy of all those papers (minus those that were not presented for various reasons) were given on CDs to both, the editor of the Journal and the editor of the proceedings. All papers presented were reproduced in the proceedings.

As all the presenters had given a release for publication of all the papers presented at the conference, these were available to both editors since the conference of 2002. I think the system is still being followed.

While the authors have done an outstanding job in this article, I wanted to point out that the very large discrepancies seen were because they took the 2000 abstracts and proceedings as a baseline, for reasons that they have clearly indicated. Much of what they have mentioned has since been corrected and I am sure they themselves will find this to be true if they reanalyze the data using the 2002 ready reckoner list of papers presented and the proceedings of that year onward.

I once again cannot but admire the analytical minds that went into this study and the extraordinarily candid and frank interpretations of the results.

References

1Dhaliwal U, Kumar R. An observational study of the proceedings of the All India Ophthalmological Conference, 2000 and subsequent publication in indexed journals. Indian J Ophthalmol 2008;56:189-95.