Cases Journal -- Online Open Access Journal by Former BMJ Editor

Cases Journal is a peer-reviewed, open access journal publishing case reports from any area of healthcare. Case reports will be incorporated into a PubMed Central database.

The journal has interactive features typical of Web 2.0:

"Authors are encouraged to invite the patient to contribute to the case report - each article can include an optional 'Patient's perspective’ section, where the patient describes their experience of the disorder and treatment.

We do not see publication of your case report as the end of the process. Once your case report is published, you will be able to add extra information in response to comments from the reviewers. Readers may post questions on your published case report, and we strongly encourage you to post a reply. We will also invite you to share information on any follow-up to the case - we will contact you one year after your case report is published to invite you to share with readers any changes that may have occurred with the patient."


Richard Smith

The Editor-in-Chief Richard Smith is the immediate past editor of BMJ. You can see his video interview and read Why do we need Cases Journal?

In one of the first case reports, Richard Smith describes his own experience with nagging cough in Beijing. As you can see from the text, the style is closer to a blog post than to a journal article.

This new initiative proves the validity and potential usefulness of our Clinical Cases and Images project which is an online case-based curriculum of clinical medicine launched in 2005. The project is hyperlinked in the web sites of 27 medical schools in the U.S., Canada and Europe and was featured in multiple medical journals.


Screenshot of Clinical Cases and Images

We welcome the "competition" and encourage you to the subscribe to the RSS feed of Cases Journal: http://casesjournal.com/rss/

Currently, ClinicalCases.org and CasesBlog are the number one and two search results on Google for "clinical cases" among 10 million web pages (have been so for 2 years). I doubt they will continue to rank so highly but let's see what happens in a few years.

Image source: Cases Journal.