Barriers to Preparation of Case Reports among Japanese General Practitioners

摘要

Case reports are experience-based reporting of rareovel clinical cases and are an important type of publication. Such reports are of direct clinical value as well as can lead to new research.[1,2] In general, case reports are relatively easier to prepare than clinical studies. The Japan Primary Care Association Annual Meetings (JPCAMs) is the official annual meet of the largest association of general practitioners in Japan. However, only a very small proportion of abstracts presented in this conference are subsequently published as full-text articles in peer-reviewed journals (38 of 1003 abstracts; 3.8%).[3] Further, only 2 of the 38 published articles were case reports. Therefore, to offer advice on how to write reports of cases encountered in daily clinical practice, we held an interest-group session titled, “Let's write a case report! Tips to getting it accepted,” at the ninth JPCAM in June 2018. A questionnaire was administered to the participants of the interest-group session to investigate barriers to preparation of case reports among members of the Japan Primary Care Association. A total of 39 of the 50 participants provided response, and their mean age (± standard deviation) was 42.8 ± 9.6 years. The years of experience ranged from 1 to 28 years (median, 14 years). Of the respondents, 18 (46.2%) had previously prepared case reports, and the number of case reports prepared ranged from 1 to 10 (median, 2 reports).