Case report

Journal of Medical Case Reports welcomes well-described reports of cases that include the following:

• Unreported or unusual side effects or adverse interactions involving medications.
• Unexpected or unusual presentations of a disease.
• New associations or variations in disease processes.
• Presentations, diagnoses and/or management of new and emerging diseases.
• An unexpected association between diseases or symptoms.
• An unexpected event in the course of observing or treating a patient.
• Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect.

Case reports submitted to Journal of Medical Case Reports should make a contribution to medical knowledge and must have educational value or highlight the need for a change in clinical practice or diagnostic/prognostic approaches. The journal will not consider case reports describing preventive or therapeutic interventions, as these generally require stronger evidence.

Authors are encouraged to describe how the case report is rare or unusual as well as its educational and/or scientific merits in the covering letter that accompanies the submission of the manuscript.

Any images should protect the patient’s anonymity as far as possible. Any photos or medical imaging should not show the patient's name, medical record number, or date of birth. Images should be cropped only to show the key feature. As per journal policy, JMCR does not consider images with patient faces or patient facial features. If an image of a face must be published, this should be cropped so that only the affected area is shown.

Consent for publication is a mandatory journal requirement for all case reports. Written informed consent for publication must be obtained from the patient (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 18, or from the next of kin if the patient has died). For more information, please see our editorial policies.

Patient ethnicity must be included in the Abstract and in the Main Body under the Case Presentation section.

Reporting standards

For case reports, Journal of Medical Case Reports requires authors to follow the CARE guidelines. The CARE checklist should be provided as an additional files. Submissions received without these elements will be returned to the authors as incomplete.

The checklist will not be used as a tool for judging the suitability of manuscripts for publication in Journal of Medical Case Reports, but is intended as an aid to authors to clearly, completely, and transparently let reviewers and readers know what authors did and found. Using the CARE guideline to write the case report and completing the CARE checklist are likely to optimize the quality of reporting and make the peer review process more efficient.

Preparing your manuscript

The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

Title page

The title page should:

• present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
  • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review, A case report etc."
  • or, for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
  • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
  • Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript

  Abstract

  The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

  • Background: why the case should be reported and its novelty
  • Case presentation: a brief description of the patient’s clinical and demographic details, the diagnosis, any interventions and the outcomes
  • Conclusions: a brief summary of the clinical impact or potential implications of the case report

  Keywords

  Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

  Background

  The Background section should explain the background to the case report or study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature.

  Case presentation

  This section should include a description of the patient’s relevant demographic details, medical history, symptoms and signs, treatment or intervention, outcomes and any other significant details.

  Discussion and Conclusions

  This should discuss the relevant existing literature and should state clearly the main conclusions, including an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

  List of abbreviations

  If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

  Declarations

  All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

  • Ethics approval and consent to participate
  • Consent for publication
  • Availability of data and materials
  • Competing interests
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Authors' information (optional)

  Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

  If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.

  Ethics approval and consent to participate

  Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

  • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
  • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

  Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

  See our editorial policies for more information.

  If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

  Consent for publication

  If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

  You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

  See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

  If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

  Availability of data and materials

  All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

  Authors are also encouraged to preserve search strings on searchRxiv https://searchrxiv.org/, an archive to support researchers to report, store and share their searches consistently and to enable them to review and re-use existing searches. searchRxiv enables researchers to obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) for their search, allowing it to be cited.

  Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
  • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
  • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
  • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

  More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

  BioMed Central strongly encourages the citation of any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:

  
  Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

  With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

  The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]. [Reference number]

  If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

  Competing interests

  All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

  See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

  Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

  If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

  Funding

  All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. If the funder has a specific role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, this should be declared.

  Authors' contributions

  The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

  Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

  Acknowledgements

  Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

  Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

  See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

  If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

  Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

  Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

  Authors' information

  This section is optional.

  You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

  Footnotes

  Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

  Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

  Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

  References

  Examples of the Vancouver reference style are shown below.

  See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice

  Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites, should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013. If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.

  Example reference style:

  Article within a journal

  Smith JJ. The world of science. Am J Sci. 1999;36:234-5.

  Article within a journal (no page numbers)

  Rohrmann S, Overvad K, Bueno-de-Mesquita HB, Jakobsen MU, Egeberg R, Tjønneland A, et al. Meat consumption and mortality - results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. BMC Medicine. 2013;11:63.

  Article within a journal by DOI

  Slifka MK, Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Dig J Mol Med. 2000; doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

  Article within a journal supplement

  Frumin AM, Nussbaum J, Esposito M. Functional asplenia: demonstration of splenic activity by bone marrow scan. Blood 1979;59 Suppl 1:26-32.

  Book chapter, or an article within a book

  Wyllie AH, Kerr JFR, Currie AR. Cell death: the significance of apoptosis. In: Bourne GH, Danielli JF, Jeon KW, editors. International review of cytology. London: Academic; 1980. p. 251-306.

  OnlineFirst chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

  Saito Y, Hyuga H. Rate equation approaches to amplification of enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Top Curr Chem. 2007. doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

  Complete book, authored

  Blenkinsopp A, Paxton P. Symptoms in the pharmacy: a guide to the management of common illness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science; 1998.

  Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

  Healthwise Knowledgebase. US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. 1998. http://www.healthwise.org. Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

  Supplementary material/private homepage

  Doe J. Title of supplementary material. 2000. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22 Feb 2000.

  Doe, J: Title of preprint. http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/mydata.html (1999). Accessed 25 Dec 1999.

  Doe, J: Trivial HTTP, RFC2169. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2169.txt (1999). Accessed 12 Nov 1999.

  ISSN International Centre: The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org (2006). Accessed 20 Feb 2007.

  Dataset with persistent identifier

  Zheng L-Y, Guo X-S, He B, Sun L-J, Peng Y, Dong S-S, et al. Genome data from sweet and grain sorghum (Sorghum bicolor). GigaScience Database. 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100012.

  Figures, tables and additional files

  See General formatting guidelines for information on how to format figures, tables and additional files.