Qualitative research makes an important contribution to research in the medical sciences. It has a particular role in providing understanding with respect to decisions and behaviours of patients and professionals, in exploring factors affecting the implementation of new interventions, and in developing theory in fields such as illness behaviour, clinical decision making, illness prevention, and...

All editors of medical journals have a duty to safeguard the integrity of the publishing process and must ensure that the articles that they publish do not infringe accepted ethical standards. It is, of course, the case that journals occasionally receive submissions the ethical standards of which raise concern, and in this respect The Journal of Laryngology & Otology (JLO) is no exception. Devi...

Open Access – the future of medical publishing Welcome to the third Edition of Clinical Ophthalmology of 2007. In this issue, we offer our usual wide range of original research papers covering clinical and basic sciences. We have a number of papers on surgical ophthalmology such as Agarwal and colleagues (2007), who describe the use of the very small incision Microphakonit in cataract surgery. ...