[Bibliometrical analysis of Medline publications in neuro-ophthalmology]

To analyze the contents of international publications in neuro-ophthalmology during the past decade.

Medline was searched with the Internet provider PubMed in December 2003, using "eye disease" as the medical subject heading and "optic nerve", "visual pathway", "visual cortex", "ocular motility", and "pupil" as subhead terms for retrieving English-language neuro-ophthalmic articles that were published between 1993 and 2002.

A total of 9,585 English-written original articles available for analysis were concerned with a wide range of basic and clinical neuro-ophthalmic subjects, the order of frequency being ocular motility (22.8%), optic nerve (17.2%), visual functions (17.2%), visual cortex (10.1%), retina (8.6%), ocular adnexa (5.9%), optic chiasm (5.8%), brainstem (3.1%), and pupil (3.0%). The major optic nerve disorders included demyelinated optic neuritis, Leber hereditary optic neuropathy, and ischemic optic neuropathy. The major ocular motility disorders were supranuclear palsy, progressive external ophthalmoplegia, and ocular motor nerve disease. The articles were contributed from 73 countries. The top 10 countries ranked by share were USA (40.4%), United Kingdom (10.2%), Japan (8.7 %), Germany (6.0%), Italy (4.0%), Canada (3.5%), France (3.5%), Australia (2.2%), Israel (1.8%), and Turkey (1.8%). Researchers with diverse specialties contributed to the neuro-ophthalmic publications, including ophthalmology (40.5%), neurology/neuroscience (21.7%), and neurosurgery (5.9%).

Neuro-ophthalmic papers were interdisciplinary, contributed by researchers with diverse specialties, and published in a wide range of biomedical as well as neurological journals.