Instructions for Authors

Please ensure you use one of the templates to prepare your case report:

Full cases template (Word document) | Images in... template (Word document)

• What cases do we want to publish?
• What will it cost?
• How to write for BMJ Case Reports
• Where to submit your cases
• Patient consent form
• Competing interests

What cases do we want to publish?

BMJ Case Reports is interested in any case that fulfils the following criteria:

• Reminder of important clinical lesson
• Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect
• Learning from errors
• Unusual presentation of more common disease/injury
• Myth exploded
• Rare disease
• New disease
• Novel diagnostic procedure
• Novel treatment (new drug/intervention; established drug/procedure in new situation)
• Unusual association of diseases/symptoms
• Unexpected outcome (positive or negative) including adverse drug reactions
• Images in... These are very brief articles comprising 1 or 2 striking and/or clinically important images with a brief (<250 words) description of the educational message

Cases will be judged on clinical interest and educational value NOT novelty or rarity. Each case will be peer reviewed by at least one member of the editorial board.

What will it cost?

BMJ Case Reports has a unique business model whereby users (whether authors and/or readers) become Fellows .

• Individuals pay an annual fellowship fee of £95; US$180; €130 (plus applicable VAT). During your 12 month Fellowship period you can submit as many cases as you like, access all the published material, and re-use any published material for personal use and teaching without further permission.
• Fees are waived for users in Hinari countries
• We also offer Institutional Fellowships – faculty and staff in such institutions will not have to pay individual fellowship fees. For further information and pricing (based on the number of full time equivalents at the institution) contact our institutional sales team

How to write for BMJ Case Reports

To ensure that the cases are published in an easy to find, easy to read format we require all authors to submit using our Word templates (one for full cases and one for Images in...).
Full cases template (Word document)
Images in... template (Word document)

Simply save a blank template to your computer, rename using a logical format (we suggest first author’s name and date of submission, eg, Smith_June_2008.doc), and fill in the boxes!

You must have a signed BMJ Group Patient consent form from your patient(s)/guardian(s) for publication before submitting your article.

Where to submit your cases

All cases must be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bmjcasereports. On submission you will be asked to complete a series of fields as follows:

• Patient consent
• Please read this advice carefully
• Patient consent form (available in 13 languages)
• Type of case (see What cases do we want to publish?)
• Title of case
• Authors
• Specialty
• Select one or more clinical topics from the list provided. These topics will be used to find the right expert to peer review your case, and will be used if the case is published to link it to similar cases
• Case load
• We would like to know the approximate number patients your practice or clinic sees with the condition described; this will be important for the peer reviewers, for example, a primary care practitioner will have a different approach from a neurologist to a patient with multiple sclerosis
• Summary (not needed for Images in...)
• Cut and paste this from your Word template. Please provide up to 150 words highlighting the most important aspects of the case presentation and outcome
• Competing interests
• Please read this advice carefully
• Acknowledgements
• Patient demographics
• These details will not be published but will be used to help users search for the most relevant cases, eg, readers will be able to restrict search results by age, sex, and ethnicity
• Follow-up
• To make BMJ Case Reports as valuable as possible we invite you to let us know what happens to the patient(s) – you can come back in 6 months or 6 years and update us on the patient’s progress/outcome. There is no commitment to follow-up if you say “yes” at this stage

You will then be asked to upload your completed Word template as well as any images and multimedia files.

You will also be asked to agree to our Intellectual Property Rights Assignment and BMJ Case Reports Author Fellow Terms and Conditions.

Format for Images

We encourage you to submit all relevant images and there is no restriction on the use of colour.

We accept images in the following formats; jpg, tiff, gif, PowerPoint and eps.

All black and white images should be saved to a minimum of 300 dpi.

Colour images should be saved and supplied as a high quality file to a minimum of 600 dpi. Colour images should not exceed 2MB at a minimum resolution of 600 dpi. If you choose a higher resolution your image dimension should be reduced accordingly to keep the file under 2MB.

NB. Scanners may automatically increase image size at a higher resolution.

Multimedia and Supplemental files

You may submit video and other files to enhance your case report (video files should be supplied as .avi or .mpg). You may also submit supplementary material to support the submission and review of your article, eg, papers in press elsewhere, published articles, raw data.

Patient consent

Publication of any personal information about an identifiable living patient requires the signed consent of the patient or guardian (this is a requirement under the UK’s Data Protection legislation). We expect authors to use the BMJ Group consent form which is available in 13 languages.

BMJ Case Reports follows the BMJ policy on patient confidentiality and authors are strongly advised to read this information before submitting their articles.

Competing interests

A competing interest exists when professional judgement concerning a primary interest (such as patients' welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain or personal rivalry). It may arise for the authors of an article when they have a financial interest that may influence, probably without their knowing, their interpretation of their results or those of others.

We believe that, to make the best decision on how to deal with a paper, we should know about any such competing interest that authors may have. We are not aiming to eradicate competing interests; they are almost inevitable. We will not reject cases simply because you have a competing interest, but we will make a declaration on whether you have competing interests.

We used to ask authors about any competing interests, but we have decided to restrict our request to financial interests. This is largely a tactical move. We hope that it will increase the number of authors who disclose competing interests. Our experience, supported by some research data, was that authors often did not disclose them.

For all manuscripts please provide a statement describing any relevant interests of all authors in the appropriate box on submission (for guidance on relevant competing interests read the BMJ declaration).

We also ask reviewers to provide statements of competing interests, and we use these when assessing the value of peer review.