Objective To learn the bibliometric characteristics of Chinese ophthalmological papers indexed in SCI database from 2007 to 2011.Methods All the ophthalmological papers published in the source journals indexed in the SCI database from 2007 to 2011 were retrieved. The papers of first authors were manually selected for bibliometric analysis.Results The ophthalmological papers published by Chinese scholars as the first author were 478, 482, 698, 791, and 1049 from 2007 to 2011 (total 3498). The five institutions that published papers in the most were Sun Yat-sen University, Capital University of Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Hong Kong Chinese University and Shanghai Jiaotong University. The papers were distributed in 625 journals. The top five journals the papers were published in were Molecular Vision (332), International Journal of Ophthalmology (268), Investigative Ophthalmology amp; Visual Science (206), Chinese Medical Journal (109), and Graefeprime;s Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology (104). The 3498 papers were cited 12 030 times, 3.44 times per paper. The rate of non-cited articles for 5 year,3 year and 2 year periods were 12.55%, 24.21% and 38.43% respectively. Conclusions Chinese ophthalmological papers indexed in SCI database have gradually increased. Chinese ophthalmological papers mainly originate in the affiliated hospital of universities and colleges. There are four ophthalmologic professional periodicals included in the top five in the quantity of articles.