For the last two years, we’ve capped off our annual publishing slate with a digital-only issue of highlights in December called (appropriately enough) The Year in Review. You can find a link to the newest one here, which includes a feature from every 2023 issue, a standout installment of each column and a collection of news stories published over the course of the year.

Taking stock of Review’s output over the previous 12 months, a few things jump out to me. First, we produce a lot. In 2023 we published just shy of one thousand articles—996, to be exact. (Yes, I’m anal retentive enough to wish we’d managed to eke out four more.)

If that number sounds high to you, it’s because of another striking characteristic of the publication. In recent years, Review has quietly become a powerhouse of clinical news coverage in eye care, generating 754 news stories in 2023 alone; three items post every weekday morning in our online news feed. The remaining 242 articles we delivered last year comprise the monthly slate of features and columns that serve as the core of this publication. Our goal with this mix is to provide how-to clinical guidance from trusted experts through the monthly issues, while also keeping you up to date on the latest research and legislative developments in the daily news feed.

A final noteworthy aspect worth a mention is that our writers don’t shy away from going deep every now and then. Last year, longtime contributor Jim Fanelli gave us 8,000 words on how to add labwork and radiologic imaging to your practice (read here), while Associate Editor Rachel Rita dashed off an 8,400-word summary of the TFOS Lifestyle Report on dry eye. In this issue, Henrietta Wang and Jack Phu provide an elegant 5,400-word CE course on how glaucoma manifests in the eye. Two months from now, Blair Lonsberry and Mitch Ibach will offer a 6,000-word breakdown of the do’s and don’ts of oral medication use in our upcoming March issue. In short, we’re not afraid to go all out once in a while to give you something comprehensive and packed with nitty-gritty details.

But sometimes, you just want to look at a cool photo. Or maybe 200. 

That’s why we created the photo atlas that forms the bulk of this month’s issue. A group of nine ODs who’ve collectively “seen it all,” as they say, organized the massive trove of images we share this month. From the daily staples of optometric practice to the rarest of the rare, you’ll find remarkable examples in the pages to follow. We’ll add to the online version continuously to keep on mapping out the world of ocular disease in as much detail as possible.

Nowadays, photos of even the rarest conditions aren’t too hard to find. Want to refresh your memory on what Stargardt’s, Leber’s or RP looks like? Just google it. But those results aren’t always reliable and, furthermore, they lack useful context or guidance. To address this, we’re going to augment our photo atlas with links to articles from the magazine that teach you what to actually do when one of these conditions shows up in your chair. My hope is that this will help you navigate our content more easily by creating new pathways for exploration, one photo at a time. 

And while you do that, we’ll get back to work on our next thousand articles. Best wishes to all for a great 2024!