Choosing a journal for a case report

Where case reports go now

General medical journals largely stopped publishing standalone case reports, and the work moved into three places: dedicated case report journals, the case sections of specialty journals, and society or regional journals that still value them.

Each has a different bar. A dedicated case journal will take a well-reported case with a clear learning point and no particular novelty. A specialty journal’s case section usually wants a case that changes something about how a condition is recognised or managed. A society journal often wants relevance to its own membership more than novelty.

Knowing which of the three you are aiming at settles most of the other decisions, including how the case should be framed.

What counts as a learning point

“First reported case of” is the weakest claim in the genre, and editors know it: with enough qualifiers anything is a first. What survives screening is a case that teaches something transferable.

• A diagnostic trap — a presentation that reliably looks like something else, with the feature that distinguishes them.
• An adverse effect that is not in the labelling, reported with enough detail to support causality assessment.
• A management decision where the guideline is silent and the reasoning is generalisable.
• A negative case — the expected treatment failed, and why that matters for the next patient.

If you cannot state the learning point in one sentence that would be useful to a clinician who will never see this exact case, the problem is the case selection rather than the journal.

Reporting to CARE

The CARE guideline is the reporting standard for case reports, and an increasing number of journals screen against its checklist 1. It is short and most of it is uncontroversial, but three items decide a lot of desk rejections.

The timeline — a chronological figure or table of the episode — is the item most often missing and the one reviewers most often ask for. Patient perspective is requested by many journals and omitted by most authors. And informed consent must be documented, which for a case report is not optional and cannot be obtained retrospectively if the patient cannot be traced.

Building a shortlist

Work from the destination back to the framing, in four steps.

1. Search for your condition plus “case report” restricted to the last two years. What you find is the live list; what you remember from training is not.
2. Check the instructions for a word limit and a figure limit. Case report sections are tight and a 3,000-word case rules out most of them immediately.
3. Check indexing. Several dedicated case journals are not in MEDLINE, which matters if the report has to count for anything formal.
4. Check the fee. Some case journals charge a publication fee that surprises authors late. It may be reasonable; it should not be a surprise.

Writing it so it survives screening

The abstract of a case report should state the learning point, not the presentation. An abstract that reads as a narrative of what happened leaves the editor to work out why it matters, and editors screening a pile do not.

The discussion should be short and should resist the review-article instinct. A case report that spends 1,200 words summarising the literature on the condition reads as padding around a thin case. Two paragraphs placing the case against what is known, and one on what to do differently, is usually the right shape.

Common questions

@misc{how_should_physicians_choose_the_right_2026,
  author       = {{Pubrica Academy}},
  title        = {Choosing a journal for a case report},
  howpublished = {Pubrica},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {feb},
  url          = {https://pubrica.com/insights/how-should-physicians-choose-the-right-journal-for-submitting-a-case-report/},
  note         = {Accessed: <span data-cite-acc="iso">2026-10-15</span>}
}