Why publish a medical case report

Why publish a medical case report?Mehrdad JalalianEditor In-Chief, Electronic Physician, Mashhad, IranCorresponding Author:Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian, Electronic Physician, Mashhad, Iran. Email: mehrdad.medic@gmail.comKeywords: scientific writing, journal, case reportBibliographic Information of this article:[Mehrdad Jalalian. Why publish a medical case report? Electronic Physician, 2014; 6 (2): 786-787]. (ISSN: 2008-5842). http://www.ephysician.ir Available online at: http://www.ephysician.ir/2014/786-787.pdfThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a report is an account given of a particular matter, especiallyin the form of an official document, after thorough investigation or consideration by an appointed person or body(1). In the clinical sciences domain, the case reports usually describe rare or important cases (2). A commonquestion in the minds of young clinicians is whether a case is valuable enough to be reported in the form of a casereport article. Based on my years of experience editing case report articles and supervising postgraduate medicalstudents in writing and publishing case reports, I categorize case report articles into four main types: Rare cases,clinically important cases, Cases with impact on health-treatment standard operating procedures, and educationalcases.The first type of case reports consists of reports that address rare cases. Without doubt, such rare casesshould be reported, and, indeed, such reports are traditionally the most common type of case report, and they shouldbe, and generally are, welcomed by academic journals. However, the current atmosphere in academia requiresextensive lists of citations for articles to be recognized as valuable contributions to existing knowledge and to bedeemed worthy of publication. To me, that definitely is a significant and questionable deviation in assessingknowledge, and it forces journal editors to reject rare case reports because they cannot possibly include largenumbers of citations of other related work that has been published. To be honest, an article that is published for thesake of being cited has very little value. There are numerous benefits that accrue to science when rare case reportsare published, including their potential influence in developing new hypotheses, which can be a vital contribution tothe science. Case reports of new occurrences of diseases in a population that is usually free of that disease can becategorized in this group. The second type of case reports account for clinically important issues. These articlesusually present, for example, new side effects of medicines, short- and long-term consequences of diseases and theirrare complications, and adverse responses to routine treatment protocols. It is apparent that these case reports cancontain extremely important new pieces of knowledge that have the potential for expanding our current knowledgeof clinical situations and medical treatment protocols. The third type of case reports are those with an impact on thecurrent standard operating procedures in clinical science and public health management. This type of case reportsconveys practical and valuable information that shows the effectiveness or reliability of a standard procedure, orsuch reports may warn of the need for changes in routine health surveillance techniques (3). Indeed, they can teachthe health policy makers how to manipulate their current routines and standards to achieve higher levels ofperformance and effectiveness. Educational or classical cases are the fourth category of case report articles. Onemay claim that there is no value in publishing the classical cases that have no unique or rare feature; however, theclassical cases are vitally important for their educational value in clinical studies. No matter what types of casereports they receive for potential publication, the academic journals should consider them to be equal in value tocohort studies, with the only difference being that the case reports discuss and monitor individual cases rather than agroup.