[Writing and publication of a clinical case report]

Abstract

A case report represents a collection of detailed information about an individual patient, written with the purpose to disseminate clinical outcomes, not previously reported. Case reports provide a rich resource for teaching and research in medicine. Despite the limitation of case reports, these are useful to generate new hypothesis for future large scale clinical trials. A clinical case report should be well structured and convey a clear message. Elements of a case report are similar to all forms of medical scientific articles: title, structured abstract, introduction, case report, discussion, conclusion and references. A well written case report with literature support and a detailed description of management of the case has the greatest chances to be published. "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts to Biomedical Journals" form the basis for most journal instructions regarding content and formatting and should be consulted when journal's instructions don't answer to author's questions. In this paper we present a case report check sheet to use as a form of self-evaluation, prior to submitting the articles.