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Case Reports

Criteria

Case reports generally fall into one of the following categories:

*Unreported or unusual side effects or adverse interactions involving medications.

*Unexpected or unusual presentations of a disease.

*New associations or variations in disease processes.

Presentations, diagnoses and/or management of new and emerging diseases.

*An unexpected association between diseases or symptoms.

*An unexpected event in the course of observing or treating a patient.

*Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect.

Case reports should include an up-to-date review of all previous cases in the field.

Authors should seek written and signed consent to publish the information from the patients or their guardians prior to submission. The submitted manuscript must include a statement to this effect in the 'Consent' section, as follows: "Written informed consent was obtained from the patient for publication of this case report and accompanying images". The editorial office may request copies of the informed consent documentation upon submission of the manuscript.

Word count limit: 1500 

Abstract: Narrative

Article subheadings: 1- Background 2-Case presentation  3- Discussion.

Preparing your manuscript

The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

Title page 

The title page should:

  •  present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
    • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review, A case report etc."
    • or, for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
  • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors
    • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    • Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript
  •  indicate the corresponding author


Abstract

The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

  • Background: why the case should be reported and its novelty
  • Case presentation: a brief description of the patient’s clinical and demographic details, the diagnosis, any interventions and the outcomes
  • Conclusions: a brief summary of the clinical impact or potential implications of the case report


Keywords 

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

Background

The Background section should explain the background to the case report or study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature.

Case presentation

This section should include a description of the patient’s relevant demographic details, medical history, symptoms and signs, treatment or intervention, outcomes and any other significant details.

Discussion and Conclusions

This should discuss the relevant existing literature and should state clearly the main conclusions, including an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

Examples of the Basic Springer reference style are shown below. 

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice.

Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites, should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013. If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.

​​​​​​​Example reference style:

Article within a journal

Smith J, Jones M Jr, Houghton L (1999) Future of health insurance. N Engl J Med 965:325-329.

Article by DOI (with page numbers)

Slifka MK, Whitton JL (2000) Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J Mol Med 78:74-80. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Article by DOI (before issue publication and with page numbers)

Slifka MK, Whitton JL (2000) Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J Mol Med. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Article in electronic journal by DOI (no paginated version)

Slifka MK, Whitton JL (2000) Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Dig J Mol Med. doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

Journal issue with issue editor

Smith J (ed) (1998) Rodent genes. Mod Genomics J 14(6):126-233.

Journal issue with no issue editor

Mod Genomics J (1998) Rodent genes. Mod Genomics J 14(6):126-233.

Book chapter, or an article within a book

Brown B, Aaron M (2001) The politics of nature. In: Smith J (ed) The rise of modern genomics, 3rd edn. Wiley, New York.

Complete book, authored

South J, Blass B (2001) The future of modern genomics. Blackwell, London.

Complete book, edited

Smith J, Brown B (eds) (2001) The demise of modern genomics. Blackwell, London.

Complete book, also showing a translated edition [Either edition may be listed first.]

Adorno TW (1966) Negative Dialektik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. English edition: Adorno TW (1973) Negative Dialectics (trans: Ashton EB). Routledge, London.

Chapter in a book in a series without volume titles

Schmidt H (1989) Testing results. In: Hutzinger O (ed) Handbook of environmental chemistry, vol 2E. Springer, Heidelberg, p 111.

Chapter in a book in a series with volume titles

Smith SE (1976) Neuromuscular blocking drugs in man. In: Zaimis E (ed) Neuromuscular junction. Handbook of experimental pharmacology, vol 42. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 593-660.

OnlineFirst chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

Saito, Yukio, and Hyuga, Hiroyuki. (2007) Rate equation approaches to amplification of enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Topics in Current Chemistry. doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

Proceedings as a book (in a series and subseries)

Zowghi D (1996) A framework for reasoning about requirements in evolution. In: Foo N, Goebel R (eds) PRICAI'96: topics in artificial intelligence. 4th Pacific Rim conference on artificial intelligence, Cairns, August 1996. Lecture notes in computer science (Lecture notes in artificial intelligence), vol 1114. Springer, Heidelberg, p 157.

Article within conference proceedings with an editor (without a publisher)

Aaron M (1999) The future of genomics. In: Williams H (ed) Proceedings of the genomic researchers, Boston, 1999.

Article within conference proceedings without an editor (without a publisher)

Chung S-T, Morris RL (1978) Isolation and characterization of plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid from Streptomyces fradiae. In: Abstracts of the 3rd international symposium on the genetics of industrial microorganisms, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 4-9 June 1978.

Article presented at a conference

Chung S-T, Morris RL (1978) Isolation and characterization of plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid from Streptomyces fradiae. Paper presented at the 3rd international symposium on the genetics of industrial microorganisms, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 4-9 June 1978.

Patent

Norman LO (1998) Lightning rods. US Patent 4,379,752, 9 Sept 1998.

Dissertation

Trent JW (1975) Experimental acute renal failure. Dissertation, University of California.

Book with institutional author

International Anatomical Nomenclature Committee (1966) Nomina anatomica. Excerpta Medica, Amsterdam.

In press article

Major M (2007) Recent developments. In: Jones W (ed) Surgery today. Springer, Dordrecht (in press). 

Online document

Doe J (1999) Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. Available via DIALOG. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Online database

Healthwise Knowledgebase (1998) US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. http://www.healthwise.org. Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

Supplementary material/private homepage

Doe J (2000) Title of supplementary material. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22 Feb 2000.

University site

Doe J (1999) Title of preprint. http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/mydata.html. Accessed 25 Dec 1999.

FTP site

Doe J (1999) Trivial HTTP, RFC2169. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2169.txt. Accessed 12 Nov 1999.

Organization site

ISSN International Centre (2006) The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org. Accessed 20 Feb 2007.

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