Author Guidelines

General consideration:

Case Reports in Clinical Practice publishes original, uncommon, educationally valuable and challenging case reports in whole aspects of clinical medicine. The manuscript submitted to this journal must include in following types: Case report, Teaching case, Clinical image, Medical error, Clinical multimedia.

Reporting Standards

Case Reports in Clinical Practice requires authors to strictly observe & follow the CARE guidelines in preparing the selected case reports before submission to the journal. The CARE checklist should be used also. The checklist is intended as an aid to authors to clearly, completely, and transparently prepare & report the case reports to let reviewers and readers know what authors did and found. Using the CARE guideline to write the case report and completing the CARE checklist will probably optimize the quality of reporting and make the peer review process more efficient. 

Authorship:

All authors must contribute to patient management/care and/or in preparing the manuscript. The number of authors should not exceed more than 4 for any article type. If it is essential to include additional author(s), the exact reason(s) must be stated and explained by corresponding author to editor in chief in cover letter.  

Manuscript Types

1. Case Report: contain the classic report of an uncommon and interesting clinical case or of a novel or improved method of management that could be applicable in clinical practice. The manuscript must include: Title page, Abstract, Key Words, Introduction, Case presentation, Discussion, and References. It may also include Tables, Figures and/or Acknowledgments.

2. Teaching Case: covers an educational and well-documented report. Although it is not essential to be very uncommon, the case report part must be brief and attractive followed by well written review in detail about the care and management of similar patients according existing evidences. The manuscript must include: Title page, Abstract, Key Words, Introduction, Case presentation, Discussion, Teaching/Learning points and References. It may also include Tables, Figures and/or Acknowledgments. Teaching case articles are generally written by persons with well-known expertise in the subject area discussed. Teaching case is by invitation only.

3. Medical errors: includes unpredicted complications despite appropriate approach to a patient based on existing evidences. It may consist of adverse drug reactions including after-marketing complications, unexpected complication of a procedure, learning points from an error and etc.  It is important to emphasize that these errors must not include a miss-management which compromise the medical ethics and patent’s rights. The manuscript must include: Title page, Abstract, Key Words, Introduction, Case presentation, Discussion, brief lessons from the case and References. It may also include Tables, Figures and/or Acknowledgments.

4. Clinical images/multimedia: high quality Clinical images or multimedia with valuable clinical or education points are subject to review in CRCP. The manuscript must include: Title page, Key Words, Case summery and References. 

Manuscript structure and format:

Each manuscript main file must be prepared as the following order: Title page, Abstract (excluding Clinical images/multimedia), Key words, Main text, Acknowledgements, References, figure legends, figures and tables. 

Title page:

- Title should be concise, specific and informative with less than 100 characters (including spaces between words).

- Include first and last name (first name, then family name) with preferred order of authors. Clear author’s affiliation(s) is required with name of department(s) and institution(s) linked to each author with a corresponding number. Please supply the full correspondence details for the corresponding author, including e-mail address fax and telephone number. Only one corresponding author for each submitted manuscript should be provided

Abstract:

- Please provide non-structured abstract with up to 150 words for “Case report”, “Teaching case” and “Medical errors”. There is no abstract for Clinical images/multimedia. The Abstract is better to be concise and attractive. Please do not use abbreviations if possible and reference citations in the abstract body. 

Key words:

- Include 3 to 6 keywords following the abstract. Please select keywords from the MeSH terms used by MEDLINE.

Main text:

- Manuscript file must be prepared and saved as Microsoft office word document (doc.).

- Use “Times New Roman” font with font size of 12.

- Typescripts must be double-spaced and have a one inch margin on all side.

- Use continuous Line numbers in the left margin of manuscript.

- All pages have to be numbered at the bottom of the page.

- The main parts for each manuscript have been noted in “Manuscript Types” section above.

- The main text of “Case presentation”, “Teaching case” and “Medical errors” should be less than 1500 words long (excluding Abstract, References, tables and legends).

- Case summery of clinical image/multimedia should be less than 300 words.

- Abbreviations should be defined at the first time of use.

- Système International (SI) units are recommended.

Acknowledgements:

- All contributions that do not meet authorship criteria should be listed in acknowledgements section. Sources of financial support should be mentioned in this section, if applicable. 

References:

-          Please use Vancouver reference style for all manuscripts types.

-          References should be numbered in order of appearance in the text in parentheses and listed numerically in the reference list.

-          Provide reference list after main text and acknowledgements.

-          List all authors when six or fewer and for articles with seven or more authors, list the first six and add “et al”.

-          Up to 15 references should be used for “Case report”, “Teaching case” and “Medical errors”. Reference number for Clinical images/multimedia should not exceed 5.

                     Example for Journal Article:

• Akhondzadeh S, Nejatisafa AA, Amini H, Mohammadi MR, Larijani B, Kashani L, et al. Adjunctive estrogen treatment in women with chronic schizophrenia: a double-blind, randomized, and placebo-controlled trial. Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry 2003; 27(6):1007-12.
• Aghamollaii V, Harirchian MH, Modabbernia A, Ghaffarpour M, Mousavi M, Tafakhori A.  Symathetic skin response (SSR) in multiple sclerosis and clinically isolated syndrome: a case-control study. Neurophysiol Clin 2011; 41(4):161-71

Figures and videos:

-          All Figures must be cited in the text and numbered consecutively in parentheses as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.

-          Up to four figures should be used for “Case report”, “Teaching case” and “Medical errors”. Use up to 2 figures for “clinical image”.

-          We can accept the following formats: TIFF, GIF, JPEG or BMP.

-          For photographic images, the acceptable resolution is 600 DPI.

-          Please do not apply any adjustment to brightness, color, or contrast to the original image.

-          Permission with written informed consent must accompany any photograph/video which subject could be identified.

-          Radiological images must not have any tags exploring the patient’s identity.

-          Each Figure must have a legend with a title and a description explaining the Figure. Please include legends consecutively in main text after references list and before figures.

-          Each Figure must be embedded consecutively with an associated label in the main text of manuscript at the end of figure legends.

-          The authors are responsible for copyrighted figures. Permission to reproduce copyright material must be cleared by the authors.

-          Upload Clinical multimedia files separately from case summery. Accepted file types include: AVI, MPEG and MP4. Please provide a video file with suitable resolution and size of less than 25 MB.

Tables:                                                                                                                                    

-          Tables should be numbered consecutively in the text, Table 1, Table 2, etc.

-          The acceptable formats are Microsoft office word or excel.

-          Insert each table with its associated footnote one after the other in the manuscript (after figures).

-          All abbreviations and should be redefined in the Footnote.