Appropriateness of <i>Pediatrics</i> Case Reports Citations

Sisk, Bryan A.; Collins, Griffin; Dillenbeck, Claire; Malatack, J. Jeffrey

doi:10.1542/peds.2018-0277

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Bryan Sisk from Washington University in St Louis, while working as an editorial fellow for Pediatrics, decided with colleagues to study how case reports from Pediatrics are cited. 28 He found that the majority provide a clear proviso that the citation is a case report and with appropriate caution, regarding its applicability, only rarely have they been cited as scientific evidence.…”

Section: What Is To Be Gained or Lost By Eliminating Case Reports?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Case for the Case Report

Malatack

2018

Pediatrics

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Case reports at one time could be found in many if not most medical journals. I found that 40 years ago, the top 10 pediatric journals all published case reports (many with designated case report sections), and 30% of the articles published in the 10 journals collectively were case reports. Twenty years ago, these same journals had reduced their case report publications, averaging only 15% of their published articles, with many having dropped a case report section altogether. In 2016, case reports only accounted for 4% of articles published in this same group of journals, with Pediatrics at 11% being the most committed to this format of medical publication. Pediatrics also is the only one of these publications with a designated section for case reports. Pediatrics' recent decision to reduce the number of published case reports from a maximum of 8 an issue to 3 an issue is the latest in this long decline. It appears that 2 forces have had a role in the decline of the case report as a genre of medical publications. The 2 forces include the impact factor, created in the 1990s, and the inability to use statistical methodology to assess the data at hand. The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited from a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times its articles are cited. A 2-year period is used and involves dividing the number of times articles that were cited in that 2-year period after publication by the number of articles that are potentially citable. Case reports are handled, for this purpose, as are original articles. Case Reports, for reasons outlined below, are invariably not going to be cited as often as original articles by the 2-year postpublication period that defines the impact factor. The other force that has led to the decline of case reports is the inability to apply statistical analysis to strengthen the scientific merit of the report. In the words of one of my coeditors, "You can't tell anything from a single case." The error in this reasoning is the supposition that a case report and an original article have anything in common. They don't.

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Section: What Is To Be Gained or Lost By Eliminating Case Reports?mentioning

confidence: 99%