Students who enter the career path of an academic scholar already know that their career is going to be full of expectations of writing manuscripts and other documents. The “publish or perish” mentality in the academic culture is a real thing. If you want to get ahead and shoot for coveted career paths, you must continually stay relevant in your field with new published research.

Each type of writing has its own frameworks that must be followed in order to keep your paper from being rejected. For instance, clinical case reports have special guidelines that researchers must follow. Using specific principles when you’re writing your case report will help you to ensure everything you need to cover is taken care of thoroughly before it is presented to your audience.

What is a Clinical Case Report?

When it comes to researching, there are endless reasons why a scholar would choose a specific avenue to experiment with. In healthcare, those reasons typically aim towards improving the way we as a collective society understand and treat a disease or problem.

However, new developments in the medical field are scrutinized carefully and require a diverse array of regulations and guidelines be followed before any product or treatment is allowed to be released for public use. Part of this analysis and thorough evaluation of the treatment in question is that a test group is used.

When there is a test performed, an individual patient or multiple patients are followed carefully. A case report is written up in which everything observed is covered, including the symptoms and signs of the post, during, and after treatment, the diagnosis in question, the treatment methods, and any follow-up protocols that were established.

In a case report, there is usually an unexpected, new, or unusual instance that occurs, which institutes the reason behind the need for a case report to be written. These might be outliers that never make a difference in the future, or they could be the precedent upon which medical progress builds new, innovative ideas.

Why Case Reports are Used

Writing a case report on every individual in the test group would be time-consuming and inefficient. But when there is an unexpected situation that arises, such as a correlation between a new symptom and the disease, an observation that was unique, or something that could possibly help researchers understand the reasoning behind a disease or a side effect, a case report is often warranted.

In some occurrences, the case study is written because there is a person who has been diagnosed with a disease but has unique or rare symptoms that are attributed to it. In other instances, the person has agreed to be the test subject for a unique approach to therapies.

Principles to Include in Your Report

As you’re writing up your case report, make sure you include these principles to ensure it is written thoroughly, professionally, and ethically:

●      The category of your report, including why you chose to write a case study (was it a unique approach to treatment, an outlier symptom, etc.)

●      The formatting requirements of the journal you plan to submit your article for publishing to when it is complete

●      All the content necessary for the reader to be able to learn the background behind your rationale

●      The evidence that takes the reader from start to finish for them to understand how you got to the outcome that you are presenting

●      A list and references to any potential literature that already exists that would help the reader understand the case study

These are necessary components of your case report. Without them, the reader will have a harder time understanding the foundation of your study and why this anomaly is so important to the field in question.