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About

Aims and scope

Journal of Medical Case Reports will consider any original case report that expands the field of general medical knowledge, and original research relating to case reports.

Case reports should show one of the following:

  • 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

Suitable research articles include but are not limited to: N of 1 trials, meta-analyses of published case reports, research addressing the use of case reports and the prevalence or importance of case reporting in the medical literature and retrospective studies that include case-specific information (age, sex and ethnicity) for all patients.

Open access

All articles published by Journal of Medical Case Reports are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

As authors of articles published in Journal of Medical Case Reports you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BMC license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BMC can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article-processing charges

Authors who publish open access in Journal of Medical Case Reports are required to pay an article processing charge (APC). The APC price will be determined from the date on which the article is accepted for publication.

The current APC, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable, for Research, and Letters to the Editor is: £2090.00/$2790.00/€2390.00.

Case Reports are subject to an APC of £1060.00/$1655.00/€1405.00.

Visit our open access support portal and our Journal Pricing FAQs for further information.

Open access funding

Visit Springer Nature’s open access funding & support services for information about research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs.

Springer Nature offers agreements that enable institutions to cover open access publishing costs. Learn more about our open access agreements to check your eligibility and discover whether this journal is included.

Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts for articles published in our fully open access journals whose corresponding authors are based in the world’s lowest income countries (see our APC waivers and discounts policy for further information). Requests for APC waivers and discounts from other authors will be considered on a case-by-case basis, and may be granted in cases of financial need (see our open access policies for journals for more information). All applications for discretionary APC waivers and discounts should be made at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance are unable to be considered.

Indexing services

All articles published in Journal of Medical Case Reports are included in:

  • CNKI
  • DOAJ
  • EBSCO Academic Search
  • EBSCO Biomedical Reference Collection
  • EBSCO Discovery Service
  • EBSCO Pharmacy Collection: India
  • EBSCO STM Source
  • EBSCO TOC Premier
  • Embase
  • Google Scholar
  • Medline
  • OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Primo
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Summon
  • PubMed Central
  • Reaxys
  • Scopus

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BioMed Central on SpringerLink.

We are working closely with relevant indexing services including Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) to ensure that articles published in Journal of Medical Case Reports will be available in their databases when appropriate.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.


Journal of Medical Case Reports operates an open peer-review system, where the reviewers' names are included on the peer review reports for authors. In addition, if the article is published, the named reviewer reports are published online alongside the article under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0. Previous versions of the manuscript and all author responses to the reviewers are available by contacting info@biomedcentral.com.


The benefit of open peer review is that it increases transparency. The peer reviewers and Editors are fully accountable for the decisions made, bias is reduced as reviewer reports are named, published reports can serve an educational purpose in helping facilitate training and research into peer review, and reviewers can get credit for their work.


Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two or more experts who will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. The Editors will reach a decision based on these reports and, where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board.


In cases where the journal is unable to find sufficient peer reviewers, the services of a publishing partner, Research Square, may be used to identify suitable reviewers and provide reports to avoid further delays for authors. Reviewers recruited by Research Square are paid a small honorarium for completing the review within a specified timeframe. Honoraria are paid regardless of the reviewer recommendation. With Research Square, a double-blind peer review system is in operation.


In cases where reports have been obtained by Research Square, the peer review reports will be unsigned unless the reviewer opts in to sign the report.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Journal of Medical Case Reports should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Editor and Editorial Board Member competing interests

Editorial Board Members and Editors

Editorial Board Members and Editors are required to declare any competing interests and may be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists. 

In addition, they should exclude themselves from handling manuscripts in cases where there is a competing interest. This may include – but is not limited to – having previously published with one or more of the authors, and sharing the same institution as one or more of the authors.

As of 20th April 2021, where an Editor or Editorial Board Member is on the author list they must declare this in the competing interests section on the submitted manuscript. If they are an author or have any other competing interest regarding a specific manuscript, another Editor or member of the Editorial Board will be assigned to assume responsibility for overseeing peer review. These submissions are subject to the exact same review process as any other manuscript.

Editorial Board Members are welcome to submit papers to the journal. These submissions are not given any priority over other manuscripts, and Editorial Board Member status has no bearing on editorial consideration.

Editorial staff

All Springer Nature journal editorial staff are required to declare to their employer any interests — financial or otherwise — that might influence, or be perceived to influence, their editorial practices. Failure to do so is a disciplinary offence. Springer Nature has a strict policy of editorial independence in individual acceptance decisions and editorial standards of quality and significance should never be compromised. While some editors are financially incentivised to achieve journal growth, we are clear in our internal policies and individuals’ contracts or formal objectives that this should be achieved by ensuring submissions of sufficient quality and never by compromising editorial standards.

Citing articles in Journal of Medical Case Reports

Articles in Journal of Medical Case Reports  should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. J Med Case Rep [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. J Med Case Rep 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should follow the procedure outlined in the BMC Editorial Policies.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Journal of Medical Case Reports's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. 

Speed of publication

Journal of Medical Case Reports offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in Journal of Medical Case Reports gives you the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Journal of Medical Case Reports are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Journal of Medical Case Reports’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in Journal of Medical Case Reports may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Journal of Medical Case Reports. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in Journal of Medical Case Reports you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BMC license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BMC, please click here.

Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2022 Citation Impact
    1.0 - 2-year Impact Factor
    0.628 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
    0.284 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

    2023 Speed
    33 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    148 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    4,048,208 downloads
    2,745 Altmetric mentions