Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A BMJ Case Reports publication describing a single patient with an unusual presentation of a known disease
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A cohort study of 200 patients is not a case report (it is a cohort study)
Editorial commentary
A case report is a peer-reviewed publication describing, in detail, one or a small number of individual cases — most often clinical, occasionally legal or social — for educational, hypothesis-generating, or rare-presentation-documenting purposes. Clinical case reports are conventionally structured according to the CARE guidelines (Gagnier et al., 2013), a 13-item consensus-based reporting checklist covering elements such as patient information, timeline, diagnostic assessment, and outcomes, with dedicated sub-items for structuring the abstract.
How this differs from a brief report and a case series
A case report is the most narrowly clinical of the short-form publication types, providing a detailed narrative of one patient’s (or a handful of patients’) presentation, investigation, intervention, and outcome. It differs from a brief report, which presents original research findings from a study (however small) rather than a narrative of individual cases, and from a case series or cohort study, which aggregates many patients into a systematic dataset rather than narrating each one individually — a cohort study of, say, 200 patients is a cohort study, not a case report, regardless of how it is written up.
Example
A published case report describing a single patient with an unusual presentation of an otherwise well-characterised disease, structured per the CARE guidelines and including a timeline of diagnosis and treatment.
Also known as
Clinical case report · Case study (clinical)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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