Im new to the research world and have been hooked up with a mentor in the orthopedics department who suggested I start with some case reports. Could someone please outline/describe what a case report consists. also what kind of timeframe is required to finish this level of research. Thanks for the help!
A little reserach help needed!
- Thread starter HawkDoc
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2001
- Messages
- 2,076
- Reaction score
- 74
First you need an interesting case(s). Some new or different presentation of a given condition. Once you have a case in mind, you need to hit the library (ovid/pubmed) and make sure that your case really is different. You write up the presentation of the patient -- x-rays and path slides are good. What you do next depends on the case. If its really a new thing, you would expound on how its pathology, treatment, and/or outcome are different from similar conditions. If it's a new presentation of an old condition, you could do the same thing, or you could use it as a platform to do a review.
Good luck,
Ed
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2006
- Messages
- 4,110
- Reaction score
- 31
First of all, you have a already patient case to write about, right? (Hopefully your orthopod didn't just tell you "to write one up") If not, then you have to look in your doc's records and see if there's some patients that are noteworthy - they presented differently or they had some interesting result. Something that you feel that academia should know about. Find ~5 of these and take them to your doc and let them have the final say-so.
If patient case is in hand, then it's a lot like the normal report format - intro, methods, results, discussion, conclusions. There's differences in the names or thrust of these divisions (methods will discuss more of how you treated a patient than how you titrate a basic solution), but the skeleton is the same. The divisions also depend on the format of the journal you want to submit to. You can find 'instructions for authors' on the website of most journals. Find the one you want to submit to and start reading the instructions there.
A good journal to look at is the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). It has tons of examples of case studies for you.
