It is best to simply tell the story and let the outcome speak for itself. Editorial or promotional remarks do not belong in a case study, no matter how great our enthusiasm. The thing of greatest value that you can provide to your colleagues is an honest record of clinical events.įinally, remember that a case study is primarily a chronicle of a patient’s progress, not a story about chiropractic. This is best left to experts in those fields. Field practitioners and students are seldom well-prepared to discuss physiology or pathology. Speculation about underlying mechanisms of the disease process or treatment should be restrained. A case study should be a fairly modest description of what actually happened. At the most superficial level, you may want to ask yourself “What is interesting about this case?” Keep your answer in mind as your write, because sometimes we become lost in our writing and forget the message that we want to convey.Īnother important general rule for writing case studies is to stick to the facts. – and form a clear picture of the story that you wish to share with your profession. Therefore, before beginning to write the study itself, you should gather all of the materials relevant to the case – clinical notes, lab reports, x-rays etc. To begin with, however, you must have a clear sense of the value of the study which you wish to describe.
Hence, it is possible to work section by section through the template to quickly produce a first draft of your study. These guidelines for the writing of case studies are designed to be consistent with the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” referenced elsewhere in the JCCA instructions to authors.Īfter this brief introduction, the guidelines below will follow the headings of our template. Therefore, you will need to write efficiently and avoid unnecessarily flowery language. While the guidelines and template contain much detail, your finished case study should be only 500 to 1,500 words in length. You might want to skip forward and take a quick look at the template now, as we will be using it as the basis for your own case study later on. This set of guidelines provides both instructions and a template for the writing of case reports for publication.
Authors may decide that the particular circumstances of their case study justify digression from our recommendations.Īdditional and useful resources for chiropractic case studies include: Guidelines are not intended to be proscriptive, and so throughout this document we advise what authors “may” or “should” do, rather than what they “must” do. These guidelines are intended to assist the relatively novice writer – practitioner or student – in efficiently navigating the relatively easy course to publication of a quality case study. However, field practitioners generally are not well-practised in writing for publication, and so may hesitate to embark on the task of carrying a case study to publication. Quite obviously, since the overwhelming majority of clinical interactions occur in the field, not in teaching or research facilities, it falls to the field practitioner to record and pass on their experiences. Case studies also provide valuable teaching material, demonstrating both classical and unusual presentations which may confront the practitioner. While case studies cannot provide specific guidance for the management of successive patients, they are a record of clinical interactions which help us to frame questions for more rigorously designed clinical studies.
Case studies are an invaluable record of the clinical practices of a profession.
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