The American Journal of Ophthalmology Will Publish American Ophthalmological Society Theses

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF OPHTHALMOLOGY (AJO) and American Ophthalmological Society (AOS) are pleased to announce a new partnership benefiting ophthalmic scholarship. To meet the need for enhanced real-time access, the American Journal of Ophthalmology will publish all future accepted AOS membership theses. Theses will be available online shortly after acceptance and also in the printed AJO edition; once a year, Theses will also be published online together in a Virtual Special Issue. We believe this will make important information more readily available to the international ophthalmic community in a timely manner and provide AOS authors with the assurance that their work is published in a widely read ophthalmic journal with a high impact factor.¹ The Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society (TAOS) will continue to be published online and will provide an important archive for the minutes of the annual meeting and executive session, abstracts of posters and other papers presented at the annual meeting, necrologies, and Howe medal presentation.²

In 1914 the AOS established the requirement that candidates for membership submit a thesis for review and approval by the Committee on Theses.³ Since the first thesis was published in 1916 until 2004, with the exception of 1922, TAOS published the membership theses, papers, and the ensuing discussion in handsome green leatherette bound volumes that were given to AOS members and sent to libraries with subscriptions.⁴ In 2005 all theses were made available online and searchable by author, subject, and title at PubMed.com. Until now, although retrieval through the PubMed portal improved access for the general readership, TAOS was only published once annually, and therefore theses were not available until many months after acceptance. Furthermore, owing to the nature of the lengthy peer review process and the limited number of articles, TAOS did not qualify for consideration of a Thompson Reuter Impact Factor rating (personal correspondence with Thompson Reuter representative, May 2012).

Direct links to the PubMed Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society collection are available in the Resources section of AOSonline.org. Since 2010, TAOS has published only membership theses. To differentiate between theses and other TAOS content between 2000 and 1950, researchers can review the scanned Table of Contents under each issue’s PubMed entry. Theses published from 1990 through 2011 are listed in The Sesquicentennial of the American Ophthalmological Society Our Mission Continues by Albert and Atzen⁵ (full text available at AOSonline.org) and in Supplementary Document 1 (Supplemental Material available at AJO.com). Prior to 1950, the Proceedings Table of Contents lists meeting discussion papers alongside membership theses, with no delineation between the 2 items; however, to assist future researchers, a scan of The American Ophthalmological Society Constitution and Signature Book is provided as Supplementary Document 2 (Supplemental Material available at AJO.com). All incoming members from 1864 through 1987 signed this book, and their names can be cross referenced to the documents, and therefore their theses, available on PubMed.

We are pleased that the AOS theses will now be published as part of the AJO and look forward to the contribution to these theses being widely available.

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN OPHTHALMOLOGICAL SOCIETY THESES

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE THESIS REQUIREMENT IS presented here for historical interest. The guidelines for AOS theses are available under the Membership section at AOSonline.org.

In 1915, Dr Alexander Duane provided the first report of the Committee on Theses in the Executive Session:

“The Report of the Committee on Theses presented by Dr. Duane:

“DR. DUANE: The Thesis Committee had presented to it a number of theses from the applicants. These were passed from one member of the Committee to another and read by all, after which there was a free discussion regarding them, first by correspondence, and afterward at a meeting of the Committee. Our views were practically unanimous on all points. As this was a new matter, and a precedent had to be established, one thing on which we debated for a long time was what sort of standard should be required in the thesis to be presented; and our feeling was that we should demand a high standard, in conformity with the reputation of this Society. We decided that the thesis should represent original work, original investigation, and a fair examination of the literature of the subject; and should be presented, both as regards form and substance, in a dignified manner, such as would, if the Council deemed right, entitle the paper to be printed in the Transactions and placed in the records of the American Ophthalmological Society. Acting on that opinion, we adopted what may seem to some a rather too critical view; but we felt that at the very beginning it was important to establish a precedent and to determine that the character of the thesis should be such as to be worthy of the Society.

“We may say that the theses varied a good deal in merit, but some were of considerable excellence. Evidently most of the applicants took the affair seriously, and prepared theses with great care; and, on the whole, we think this experiment has demonstrated that it is a valuable thing for the Society to have intending applicants present this evidence of their qualifications for admission.”³

Two years later, in 1917, the Council established the following standards:

“That standards for the thesis shall be in general those required by the A.M.A., to wit: (1) They shall contain and establish positively new facts, mode of practice, or principles of real value, or (2) They shall embody the results of well-devised, original, experimental researches, or (3) They shall present so compete a review of the facts on any particular subjects as to enable the writer to deduct therefrom legitimate conclusions of importance.”¹

In 1952, Dr Gordon Bruce, the editor of TAOS and a member of the Committee on Theses, further defined the criteria for theses, which have largely remained until the present. In 1953, the Council ruled that all identification should be removed from the thesis by the Secretary, thus enabling the Committee to judge the paper purely on its own merits. The AOS moved to include co-authors to the thesis submission in 2010 to more accurately reflect the specialized technical expertise required for thesis preparation, although the thesis should remain the original work of the candidate.

The following is an excerpt from the “Thesis Requirement" of Albert and Atzen’s recent history edition:

“The candidate must demonstrate scholarship in the form of a thesis to become a member. The thesis should be an original contribution toward the advancement of the science and art of ophthalmology. It needs to advance an original point of view supported by research or argument and present new findings or strong evidence to confirm or deny the value of a concept, procedure, or technique. Appropriate topics for a thesis include but are not limited to clinical, applied, or basic research; observational and population-based studies; medical services research; bioethics position papers; laboratory biomedical research; innovative surgical techniques; administrative issues; and other investigations that advance the science and art of ophthalmology. The most important factors are: (1) that the impetus and creativity behind the research be predominantly that of the candidate, and (2) that the work be new and original and not previously published elsewhere.”⁵