Case reports: Essential or irrelevant?

Does the medical literature need more case studies? A new journal is betting it does, even as editors at other journals say the answer is no.Historically, case reports have proven extremely valuable to clinicians faced with diseases they knew little about. But in an age where countries spend more on research than ever before investigating both rare and common diseases, some experts argue that the obscure nature of many case reports makes them of little value to the average practitioner. Case reports typically receive fewer citations than research articles, putting them in danger of being phased out at journals where citation data rule decisions, said Matthew Cockerill of BioMedCentral (BMC, sister company to The Scientist), which publishes the new online open access journal, The Journal of Medical Case Reports. Indeed, a 2005 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that case reports receive the fewest...