Several decades ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the 75th anniversary special issue of Pediatrics, writing a commentary on the three most important articles published by that Journal over its 75-y history (1). For that commentary, I was asked to identify the most important articles on child abuse over the years. There were three that were outstanding, in my view, but I described them as “three flowers in a desert”.

What I found interesting in looking back at the last several decades of issues of this journal for this commentary was how few research articles on child maltreatment there have been. Go to the Pediatric Research webpage and type “child abuse” into the search box. Several hundred items come up—the overwhelming majority of them abstracts from the Pediatric Academic Societies meetings. There are few basic or clinical research papers, and of the 125 citations, only two were from investigators with National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for their work. In fact, in my view, this desert is directly related to the paucity of funding over the last 50 y from the NIH. The field of Child Abuse Pediatrics, just recently awarded subspecialty status from the American Board of Pediatrics, has had no opportunity to develop the research and training infrastructure that has led to the extraordinary advances in child health over the past half century many reported in this journal.

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