I read with interest the paper by Vinciguerra and associates and congratulate the authors on their work. The area of collagen cross-linking (CXL) applications for younger patients is surely going to be the topic of much conversation and publication of data in the near future.

My concern regarding this paper has nothing to do with the science, but rather the title. After finding it initially by seeing it in the Journal , I tried to find it again in PubMed and found it extremely challenging to do so. I believe the use of accurate but nonstandard nomenclature is the source of the issue and would like to propose a solution for authors moving forward.

In PubMed ( www.pubmed.org ; accessed October 4, 2012) the search term cross-linking yielded more than 42 000 results, an enormous number that is not feasible to search. Using additive or refined search terms, corneal cross-linking yielded 500 references; in that subset, this article was number 39 on the list. Using pediatric cross-linking yielded 428 results, most of which were not relevant to this topic, and this article was not listed in the first 60 references. Pediatric corneal cross-linking yielded only 2 results, neither of which were this article. Further, when related citations from one of these articles were searched, this paper was not among the first 80 references listed.

Thus, this study, of excellent quality with important results, risks not being found readily in literature searches unless an individual either knows specifically what they are looking for or is extremely diligent in their search. Because this is an area where publications are just beginning to surface in the literature and where numerous other publications are likely to make it to print soon, standardized nomenclature will improve the results for authors, researchers, and readers alike by facilitating a more complete and accurate search.

Most sources, including the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health Organization ( http://www.who.int ) define children as those 2 to 11 years of age and adolescents as those between 12 and 18 years of age, although the range occasionally differs by 1 to 2 years on either end based on the source. Therefore, neither term individually technically would be correct for this study or many others, where the individuals treated are usually between 8 and 18 years of age in mixed populations. However, pediatric is a more general term referring to both children and adolescents. In recent submissions to the Journal of Refractive Surgery , original titles included the terms children , a dolescents , and juveniles ; these were all edited to include the term pediatric so that all of these articles, discussing a similar topic, will be available readily through a simple literature search.

I, therefore, propose that all papers relevant to this particular topic use pediatric corneal cross-linking in their titles in some form. If the scientific community uses this terminology, it will facilitate greatly a more complete understanding of the literature by producing more complete literature searches moving forward.