Why should medical editors CARE about case reports?

A manual corpus of annotated main findings of clinical case reports

Clinical case reports are the `eyewitness reports’ of medicine and provide a valuable, unique, albeit noisy and underutilized type of evidence. Generally a case report has a single main finding that represents the reason for writing up the report in the first place. In the present study, we present the results of manual annotation carried out by two individuals on 500 randomly sampled case reports. This corpus contains main finding sentences extracted from title, abstract and full-text of the same article that can be regarded as semantically related and are often paraphrases. The final reconciled corpus of 416 articles comprises an open resource for further study. This is the first step in establishing text mining models and tools that can identify main finding sentences in an automated fashion, and in measuring quantitatively how similar any two main findings are. We envision that case reports in PubMed may be automatically indexed by main finding, so that users can carry out information queries for specific main findings (rather than general topics)—and given one case report, a user can retrieve those having the most similar main findings. The metric of main finding similarity may also potentially be relevant to the modeling of paraphrasing, summarization and entailment within the biomedical literature.

Nuggets: findings shared in multiple clinical case reports

OBJECTIVE

The researchers assessed prevalence in the clinical case report literature of multiple reports independently reporting the same (or nearly the same) main finding.

METHODS

Results from forty-five PubMed queries were examined for incidence and features of main findings ("nuggets") shared in at least four case reports.

RESULTS

The authors found that nuggets are surprisingly prevalent and large in the case report literature, the largest found so far was reported in seventeen articles. In most cases, the main findings of case reports were evident from examining titles alone.

CONCLUSIONS

Our curated examples should serve as gold standards for developing specific automated methods for finding nuggets. Nuggets potentially enable finding-based (instead of topic-based) information retrieval.

When to write a neurology case report

Case report publication has seen a resurgence in recent years as awareness of the value of case reports in clinical medicine has grown. Not all areas of medical research are amenable to large clinical trials. Many topics are better addressed by more detailed descriptions of multi-factorial components that contribute to outcomes, and these are areas where case reports shine. Determining the suitability of a case for publication requires background research and discussion. Writing a case or series reinforces many aspects of the medical training process, and house staff are encouraged to research, write, and submit reports. The medical community benefits in many ways from case reports, from improving individual patient care to guiding future research directions.