It is the custom in Eye to state where the authors work but not what they do. Their qualifications are not mentioned at all. I refer as an example to:

Habib NE, Balmer HG, Hocking G. Efficacy and safety of sedation with propofol in peribulbar anaesthesia. Eye 2002; 16: 60–62.

All the authors work at the Royal Eye Infirmary in Plymouth, UK. Correspondence is directed to Mr Habib and we are told that he is a consultant ophthalmic surgeon, but we are told nothing more about Mr/Dr Balmer and Mr/Dr Hocking. The importance of this is buried in the paper where it states that ‘Sedation and anaesthesia were administered by …a single…anaesthetist.

There is so much to read nowadays that some readers, including me, go through a journal only reading the title, author, and then the abstract or even just the summary. Then they read more of the few papers of interest to them, as I have done with this one.

In this paper, an abstract-only reader would miss the extremely important fact that sedation should only be administered by someone trained in managing the airway of an unconscious patient. Patients are individuals and I have rendered such a patient totally unconscious with an obstructed airway with just 1 mg of midazolam—an amount so small that I anticipated almost no effect. If it was obvious at the start of the paper that either Dr Balmer or Dr Hocking was an anaesthetist, this message would be more likely to get through.