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| LETTER TO THE EDITOR |
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| Year : 2020 | Volume
: 8
| Issue : 3 | Page : 239-240 |
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Barriers to preparation of case reports among Japanese general practitioners
Tsuneaki Kenzaka1, Momoka Kamada2
1 Division of Community Medicine and Career Development, Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, Kobe; Department of Internal Medicine, Hyogo Prefectural Tamba Medical Center, Tamba, Japan
2 Department of Internal Medicine, Hyogo Prefectural Tamba Medical Center, Tamba, Japan
| Date of Submission | 27-Jan-2020 |
| Date of Decision | 22-May-2020 |
| Date of Acceptance | 22-May-2020 |
| Date of Web Publication | 20-Aug-2020 |
Correspondence Address:
Prof. Tsuneaki Kenzaka
Division of Community Medicine and Career Development, Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-1-5, Arata-cho, Hyogo-ku, Kobe, Hyogo 652-0032
Japan
 Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None  | Check |
DOI: 10.4103/sjmms.sjmms_604_19
How to cite this article:
Kenzaka T, Kamada M. Barriers to preparation of case reports among Japanese general practitioners. Saudi J Med Med Sci 2020;8:239-40 |
How to cite this URL:
Kenzaka T, Kamada M. Barriers to preparation of case reports among Japanese general practitioners. Saudi J Med Med Sci [serial online] 2020 [cited 2023 Mar 28];8:239-40. Available from: https://www.sjmms.net/text.asp?2020/8/3/239/292789 |
Case reports are experience-based reporting of rare/novel clinical cases and are an important type of publication. Such reports are of direct clinical value as well as can lead to new research.[1],[2] In general, case reports are relatively easier to prepare than clinical studies. The Japan Primary Care Association Annual Meetings (JPCAMs) is the official annual meet of the largest association of general practitioners in Japan. However, only a very small proportion of abstracts presented in this conference are subsequently published as full-text articles in peer-reviewed journals (38 of 1003 abstracts; 3.8%).[3] Further, only 2 of the 38 published articles were case reports. Therefore, to offer advice on how to write reports of cases encountered in daily clinical practice, we held an interest-group session titled, “Let's write a case report! Tips to getting it accepted,” at the ninth JPCAM in June 2018. A questionnaire was administered to the participants of the interest-group session to investigate barriers to preparation of case reports among members of the Japan Primary Care Association. A total of 39 of the 50 participants provided response, and their mean age (± standard deviation) was 42.8 ± 9.6 years. The years of experience ranged from 1 to 28 years (median, 14 years). Of the respondents, 18 (46.2%) had previously prepared case reports, and the number of case reports prepared ranged from 1 to 10 (median, 2 reports).
Twenty-seven participants reported barriers to preparation of case reports. The most common barrier was the process of preparing articles (18 of 27; 66.7%) (e.g., identification of cases, lack of clarity on aspects of medical care to be reported, the writing process, difficulty in discussing issues and clinical significance of individual cases and unavailability of instructors). The second most common barriers were literature search/article acquisition (e.g., no knowledge of how to conduct a literature search and lack of access to articles) and the time required to prepare articles (8 participants each; 29.6%). Other barriers reported were motivation to prepare articles (3; 11.1%), costs (i.e., English translation and proofreading fees and article processing charges) and disinclination to write articles in English (2 participants each; 7.4%), and selection of a journal for publication and ethical review was 1 participant each (3.7%).
As the process of preparing manuscripts was found to be the most important and as this is a rectifiable barrier, we suggest that primary care physicians should be provided training and institutional support to produce case reports that are of publishable quality. To rectify this at an earlier stage itself, the authors recommend that medical schools should provide training on how to identify cases that should be reported and also on the process of writing case reports. Further, primary care physicians should be made aware of guidelines that provide checklists, which are excellent resources for understanding the requirements of this type of publication, and thus also ensure best practices. One such example is the widely accepted CARE guidelines, whose checklist provides detailed requirements for the content expected in each section, thereby ensuring accuracy and transparency in reporting the case.[4]
Financial support and sponsorship
Nil.
Conflicts of interest
There are no conflicts of interest.
| References | |  |
| 1. | Ortega-Loubon C, Culquichicón C, Correa R. The importance of writing and publishing case reports during medical training. Cureus 2017;9:e1964.  |
| 2. | Carey JC. The importance of case reports in advancing scientific knowledge of rare diseases. Adv Exp Med Biol 2010;686:77-86. |
| 3. | Komagamine J, Yabuki T. Full-text publication rate of abstracts presented at the Japan Primary Care Association Annual Meetings (2010-2012): A retrospective observational study. BMJ Open 2018;8:e021585. |
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