psychiatry research case reports journal impact factor

Case report

Case reports submitted to BMC Psychiatry should make a contribution to medical knowledge and must have educational value or highlight the need for a change in clinical practice or diagnostic/prognostic approaches. We will not consider reports on topics that have already been well characterised or where other, similar, cases have already been published.

BMC Psychiatry will not consider case reports describing preventive or therapeutic interventions, as these generally require stronger evidence.

BMC Psychiatry welcomes well-described and novel reports of cases that include the following: • Unreported or unusual side effects or adverse interactions involving medications. • Unexpected or unusual presentations of a disease. • New associations or variations in disease processes. • Presentations, diagnoses and/or management of new and emerging diseases. • An unexpected association between diseases or symptoms. • An unexpected event in the course of observing or treating a patient. • Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect.

Authors must describe how the case report is rare or unusual as well as its educational and/or scientific merits in the covering letter that will accompany the submission of the manuscript. Case report submissions will be assessed by the Editors and will be sent for peer review if considered appropriate for the journal.

Case reports should include relevant positive and negative findings from history, examination and investigation, and can include clinical photographs, provided these are accompanied by a statement that written consent to publish was obtained from the patient(s). Case reports should include an up-to-date review of all previous cases in the field. Authors should follow the CARE guidelines and the CARE checklist should be provided as an additional file.

Authors should seek written and signed consent to publish the information from the patient(s) or their guardian(s) prior to submission. The submitted manuscript must include a statement that this consent was obtained in the consent to publish section as detailed in our editorial policies .

BMC Psychiatry strongly supports open research, including transparency and openness in reporting. Further details of our Data availability policy can be found on the journal's About page.

Professionally produced Visual Abstracts BMC Psychiatry will consider visual abstracts. As an author submitting to the journal, you may wish to make use of services provided at Springer Nature for high quality and affordable visual abstracts where you are entitled to a 20% discount. Click here to find out more about the service, and your discount will be automatically be applied when using this link.

Preparing your manuscript

The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

Title page

The title page should:

"A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review, A case report etc."
or, for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT , do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria . Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript
indicate the corresponding author

The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

Background: why the case should be reported and its novelty
Case presentation: a brief description of the patient’s clinical and demographic details, the diagnosis, any interventions and the outcomes
Conclusions: a brief summary of the clinical impact or potential implications of the case report

Keywords

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

The Background section should explain the background to the case report or study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature.

Case presentation

This section should include a description of the patient’s relevant demographic details, medical history, symptoms and signs, treatment or intervention, outcomes and any other significant details.

Discussion and Conclusions

This should discuss the relevant existing literature and should state clearly the main conclusions, including an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Consent for publication, availability of data and materials, competing interests, authors' contributions, acknowledgements.

Authors' information (optional)

Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

See our editorial policies for more information.

If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Authors are also encouraged to preserve search strings on searchRxiv https://searchrxiv.org/ , an archive to support researchers to report, store and share their searches consistently and to enable them to review and re-use existing searches. searchRxiv enables researchers to obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) for their search, allowing it to be cited.

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here .

BioMed Central strongly encourages the citation of any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:

Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]. [Reference number]

If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes , you can do so by visiting our submission portal . Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support ( example ).

All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. If the funder has a specific role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, this should be declared.

The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies .

Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

Authors' information

This section is optional.

You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

Examples of the Vancouver reference style are shown below.

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice

Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites, should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do . Accessed 20 May 2013. If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.

Example reference style:

Article within a journal

Smith JJ. The world of science. Am J Sci. 1999;36:234-5.

Article within a journal (no page numbers)

Rohrmann S, Overvad K, Bueno-de-Mesquita HB, Jakobsen MU, Egeberg R, Tjønneland A, et al. Meat consumption and mortality - results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. BMC Medicine. 2013;11:63.

Article within a journal by DOI

Slifka MK, Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Dig J Mol Med. 2000; doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

Article within a journal supplement

Frumin AM, Nussbaum J, Esposito M. Functional asplenia: demonstration of splenic activity by bone marrow scan. Blood 1979;59 Suppl 1:26-32.

Book chapter, or an article within a book

Wyllie AH, Kerr JFR, Currie AR. Cell death: the significance of apoptosis. In: Bourne GH, Danielli JF, Jeon KW, editors. International review of cytology. London: Academic; 1980. p. 251-306.

OnlineFirst chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

Saito Y, Hyuga H. Rate equation approaches to amplification of enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Top Curr Chem. 2007. doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

Complete book, authored

Blenkinsopp A, Paxton P. Symptoms in the pharmacy: a guide to the management of common illness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science; 1998.

Online document

Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Online database

Healthwise Knowledgebase. US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. 1998. http://www.healthwise.org. Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

Supplementary material/private homepage

Doe J. Title of supplementary material. 2000. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22 Feb 2000.

University site

Doe, J: Title of preprint. http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/mydata.html (1999). Accessed 25 Dec 1999.

Doe, J: Trivial HTTP, RFC2169. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2169.txt (1999). Accessed 12 Nov 1999.

Organization site

ISSN International Centre: The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org (2006). Accessed 20 Feb 2007.

Dataset with persistent identifier

Zheng L-Y, Guo X-S, He B, Sun L-J, Peng Y, Dong S-S, et al. Genome data from sweet and grain sorghum (Sorghum bicolor). GigaScience Database. 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100012 .

Figures, tables and additional files

See General formatting guidelines for information on how to format figures, tables and additional files.

Submit manuscript

Important information

Editorial board

For authors

For editorial board members

For reviewers

Manuscript editing services

Annual Journal Metrics

2022 Citation Impact 4.4 - 2-year Impact Factor 4.9 - 5-year Impact Factor 1.535 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) 1.291 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

2023 Speed 31 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median) 146 days submission to accept (Median)

2023 Usage 8,228,380 downloads 7,538 Altmetric mentions

More about our metrics

Peer-review Terminology

The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:

Identity transparency: Single anonymized

Reviewer interacts with: Editor

Review information published: Review reports. Reviewer Identities reviewer opt in. Author/reviewer communication

More information is available here

BMC Psychiatry

ISSN: 1471-244X

Submission enquiries: [email protected]
General enquiries: [email protected]

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
J Med Case Rep

How to choose the best journal for your case report

Richard a. rison.

1 University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles County Medical Center, 12401 Washington Blvd., Whittier, CA 90602 USA

2 PIH Health Hospital-Whittier Stroke Center, PIH Health Hospital Non-Invasive Vascular Laboratory, 12401 Washington Blvd., Whittier, CA 90602 USA

Jennifer Kelly Shepphird

3 JKS Science & Medical Writing, Los Angeles, CA USA

Michael R. Kidd

4 Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001 Australia

5 Department of Family & Community Medicine, University of Toronto, 500 University Avenue, Toronto, M5G 1V7 Canada

Since the establishment of the Journal of Medical Case Reports in 2006, the number of journals that publish case reports has increased rapidly, and most of these journals are open access. Open access publishing usually requires authors to pay publication fees while offering the articles online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The movement for open access has gained support in the research community, with the publishers BioMed Central and PLOS ONE becoming leaders in scientific publishing in their number of articles and citations. As the number of open access publishers has exploded, so too has the number of publishers that act in bad faith to profit from the open access model. Simple guidelines have been developed and resources are available to help authors choose a suitable journal for publication of their case reports.

Case reports offer unique value to the body of medical knowledge by describing new diseases, disease mechanisms, therapeutic approaches, and adverse or beneficial effects of drugs. The act of recording, discussing with colleagues, and publishing clinical observations as case reports remains essential to the art of medicine and patient care [ 1 ]. These short communications generate or enforce hypotheses that may lead to further evaluation in larger study designs [ 2 ]. In providing detailed descriptions of the symptoms, signs, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of an individual patient, case reports reflect clinical experience and support medical progress. By design, the format lacks statistical sampling, placing it at the bottom of the hierarchy of clinical evidence. Case reports do not include controls, have limited sample size (one to a few individuals), and are unblinded, limitations that require a cautious approach to interpretation of findings. General medical journals publish case reports sparingly, often only publishing those that provide new information on adverse events that can be linked to an intervention [ 3 , 4 ]. Journal editors may limit inclusion of case reports because they are cited less often than meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials, which negatively affects a journal’s impact factor.

The merits of large randomized studies are well known, but many clinicians recognize the value of case reports as a complement to evidence-based medicine. The case-based nature of clinical practice often is at odds with the population-based nature of research studies, where the findings may have little relevance to an individual patient. Narrow inclusion criteria and the absence of co-morbidities in randomized trials often create a disconnection between typical patient populations and populations represented in research studies [ 3 ]. Case reports provide enough detail on one or a small number of patients for clinicians to relate to their own practice. They are educational and interesting to read. For the challenging and patient-centered task of reporting on individual cases with inherent heterogeneous human variability in clinical research and the goal of applicability to real-life circumstances, the CARE guidelines provide a framework for completeness and transparency in case reports. The guidelines aid in finding the balance between adequate detail and concise writing [ 5 ].

In response to renewed interest and acknowledgment of their value, the number of peer-reviewed journals that publish case reports has increased in recent years to more than 160 [ 6 ]. In the digital era of paperless journals with few space restrictions, the case report has seen a resurgence. The digital format facilitates searches, which is a key factor in their utility [ 7 ]. Most of the case report journals are open access and have high acceptance rates. As the number of new scientific journals increases, so do the number of questionable publishers that mislead researchers regarding fees, peer review, and academic credentials. The process of submitting scientific work for publication now includes the need for thorough vetting of potential publishers.

New case report journals

In line with the growing demand for case report publishing opportunities, the number of new peer-reviewed journals that focus on case reports had increased to more than 160 journals produced by 78 publishers by mid-2015. Figure 1 shows that the number of case report journals increased rapidly beginning in 2007, a timeframe that coincides with the Great Recession of the late 2000s and the concomitant decline in federal and other funding for basic science and other research. Some of the new journals cover general medicine and others cover specific therapeutic areas. Most case report journals (94%) are open access and approximately 40% are indexed in PubMed. Clinical issues covered by case report journals include previously unreported adverse effects of drugs or other treatments, unexpected events that occur in the course of observing or treating a patient, observations on disease pathogenesis, presentations and/or management of new and emerging diseases, new therapeutic approaches, ethical challenges in patient management, and strategies for preventing or overcoming medical errors [ 6 , 8 ].

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is 13256_2017_1351_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Number of case report journals by year. The number of journals that publish case reports has increased rapidly since 2007. (Reprinted with permission from Akers [ 6 ])

Open access publishing offers freely available and unrestricted use of research and scholarship, which many researchers see as vital to efficient dissemination of science in the digital world [ 9 ]. The open access model usually requires authors to pay submission and publication fees upon acceptance, typically between US $300 and $1200 [ 6 ]. The move toward making scholarly publications more accessible through open access has continued to gain supporters among the research community. The open access publisher BioMed Central launched in 2000 with 231 articles published that year in 60 journals. In 2015, the numbers increased to more than 30,000 articles in over 290 journals. In 2014, BioMed Central articles were accessed more than 277 million times and had 426,000 citations [ 10 ]. Similarly, the number of publications from the open access publisher PLOS ONE, increased from 138 at its inception in 2006 to 28,107 in 2015 [ 11 ].

Case report journals

Reprinted with permission from Akers [ 6 ]

Controversial journals and publishers

As scientific publishing shifts from a business model of subscription revenue to open access, the number of open access journals has exploded. However, the proliferation of journals that will publish seemingly anything for a fee has caused alarm among many in the global research community. Alongside many respected open access publishers, others have entered the space acting in bad faith. Some see it as the “dark side” of open access, a growing collection of pseudo-academic, prestigiously titled journals, many of which have similar but not quite identical websites and names to those of well-known established journals. Many of the websites look sufficiently impressive that non-experts doing online research have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. Experienced academics have been misled into submitting manuscripts and even serving on editorial boards for pseudo-academic journals, agreements that often are difficult to undo. Most of these journals do not post their publication fees, and often authors are not informed of fees until after submitting a manuscript. Withdrawal of a manuscript, which is necessary before submitting the same paper to a legitimate journal, may require payment of the high fees first [ 12 ]. For some authors, this means their work may be lost essentially to the disreputable publisher. Many researchers have complained about poorly executed or absent peer review, hidden fees for submission and publication, and unapproved inclusion of researchers’ names on editorial boards.

Jeffrey Beall, a librarian and associate professor at Auraria Library at the University of Colorado, Denver, coined the term “predatory open access publishing” to describe this situation. He is a critic of open access publishing, blaming the system for creating the problem of predatory publishers. His blog Scholarly Open Access, although removed by Beall for unknown reasons in January 2017, closely monitored the increasing number of open access publishers and alerted readers to individuals, publishers, publications, meetings, and scholarly metrics that, in the view of Mr Beall, appeared to exploit the open access model [ 13 ]. He maintained a list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” and another list of standalone journals. His criteria for inclusion on the lists were derived from the Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing from COPE, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors [ 14 – 16 ]. Similarly, information in these communications may help authors to discern whether they can trust a particular publisher or journal. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the USA has taken notice of questionable publication practices. In August 2016 it filed a suit against the OMICS Group, a global conglomerate based in India that publishes more than 700 open access journals. The suit claimed that the OMICS Group misled researchers, particularly with regard to their peer-review process (or lack thereof) and high fees that were not readily apparent to authors upon manuscript submission [ 17 ]. The purpose of the lawsuit, according to the FTC, is to better inform authors of publishing fees and to have a more transparent peer-review system [ 18 ]. The case is still to be litigated in federal court in Nevada at the time of writing this article.

The challenge for watchdogs and authors alike is to decide when a publisher is untrustworthy or simply unprofessional. Some publishers may fall under suspicion due to poor copy editing or amateurish website design, but this may not reflect an outright neglect of scholarly standards. It is important not to blacklist startup publishers who lack experience. Another problem with maintaining lists of disreputable publishers is that because copycat journals are often short-lived, the blacklist will continue to grow but individual entries may quickly become obsolete.

Choose the right journal: Think. Check. Submit.

The “Think. Check. Submit.” campaign arose in response to concerns about publishing practices, and the effort is supported by a coalition of scholarly publishing organizations. “Think. Check. Submit.” takes a positive approach to help researchers identify credible journals, providing up-to-date guidance for choosing where to publish [ 18 , 19 ]. To ascertain whether a journal is trusted, authors are advised to follow this checklist:

Have you read any articles in the journal before?
Is it easy to discover the latest papers in the journal?
Is the publisher name clearly displayed on the journal website?
Can you contact the publisher by telephone, email, and post?
Does the journal site explain what these fees are for and when they will be charged?
Have you heard of the editorial board members?
Do members of the editorial board mention the journal on their own websites?
Do they belong to the COPE?
If the journal is open access, is it listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)?
If the journal is open access, does the publisher belong to the OASPA?
Is the publisher a member of another trade association?

In addition to consulting colleagues and academic librarians for journal suggestions, authors have available to them several online resources. BioMed Central previously collaborated with Edanz, a company that assists authors in navigating the publication process, to create the author academy [ 10 ]. The free online guide describes best practices in writing and publishing a manuscript, including sections on choosing a journal, writing the manuscript, and publication ethics, among others. BioMed Central now contracts with Nature Research Editing Services and American Journal Experts, both of which offer similar services [ 20 , 21 ].

Several automated search tools help identify suitable journals as well. Authors insert keywords from their manuscript abstract into a search engine, which then compares the words to many online publications and Edanz Journal Selector covers a broad range of journals. The online tool is free, and Edanz also offers a journal selection service (US $300) in which experts use their publication experience to identify up to four of the best journals for a given paper [ 22 ]. The Journal/Author Name Estimator (Jane) focuses on biomedical science journals by searching the Medline database published by the US National Library of Medicine [ 23 ]. Other online services offered by publishers Springer and Elsevier suggest journals from their own extensive catalogues [ 24 , 25 ].

Impact factor

Journal impact factors, calculated and published by Thomson Reuters, measure the average number of citations per published article for papers published over a 2-year period. Despite the fact that the simple metric can be misleading, the impact factor has become, over time, a marker of journal prestige and desirability. The judgment of a paper’s value is often based more on the journal in which it appears than on its content. Many researchers contend that reliance on impact factors undervalues disciplines or study designs, such as case reports, which have lower citation rates. Overall, the number of citations of an article is commensurate with hierarchies of evidence, with meta-analyses receiving more citations than any other study design. Case reports typically receive few citations, although there are notable exceptions [ 26 ]. The number of citations of an article, however, does not necessarily reflect how widely the article has been read or the dissemination of the findings in mainstream media [ 27 ].

Efforts to embrace a broader view of value in scientific communication, and perhaps diminish the influence of impact factors, have emerged. Journals of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) no longer advertise impact factors on their websites. Similarly, in recognizing that impact factors are just one of a number of metrics, Nature journals list a suite of citation-based metrics. Only one case report journal, Taylor & Francis’s Neurocase , has received an impact factor (1.124), dating back to 1998.

Medicine/National Institutes of Health Indexed research databases are often curated to ensure the quality of included publications. Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) offers The Web of Science™, as one such example, and recently introduced the “Emerging Sources Citation Index” to complement their more selective indexes. This collection reflects the growing number of peer-reviewed publications of regional importance and in emerging fields [ 28 ].

In conclusion, the growth in number of case report journals has provided authors multiple avenues for publication but, at the same time, it has introduced a new level of uncertainty in the journal selection process. Factors to consider when choosing a journal are: the topics the journal covers, the target audience, length restrictions, and the time to publication. Open access publications, such as the Journal of Medical Case Reports from BioMed Central, offer high visibility, relatively rapid publication, and transparent publication policies. The reputation of the journal plays an increasingly important part of the decision, requiring thorough vetting of potential journals.

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on our editorial.

Authors’ contributions

All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Competing interests

RAR is a Deputy Editor and MRK is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Medical Case Reports . JKS has nothing to disclose.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Richard A. Rison, Email: ude.csu@nosir .

Jennifer Kelly Shepphird, Email: moc.gnitirwskj@nej .

Michael R. Kidd, Email: [email protected] .

Change Password

Your password must have 6 characters or more:.

a lower case character,
an upper case character,
a special character

Password Changed Successfully

Your password has been changed

Create your account

Forget yout password.

Enter your email address below and we will send you the reset instructions

If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to reset your password

Forgot your Username?

Enter your email address below and we will send you your username

If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to retrieve your username

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has updated its Privacy Policy and Terms of Use , including with new information specifically addressed to individuals in the European Economic Area. As described in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, this website utilizes cookies, including for the purpose of offering an optimal online experience and services tailored to your preferences.

Please read the entire Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. By closing this message, browsing this website, continuing the navigation, or otherwise continuing to use the APA's websites, you confirm that you understand and accept the terms of the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, including the utilization of cookies.

APA’s Journals Celebrate Latest Impact Factors

Search for more papers by this author

Cover of The American Journal of Psychiatry

Clarivate Analytics has released the latest edition of its Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2022), which provide journals’ latest impact factors. An impact factor is a bibliometric calculation that describes the level of importance of a journal’s published output on the scientific literature by measuring how much the work it publishes is cited by others.

The American Journal of Psychiatry ( AJP ) remains an elite publication in all of science, as this year its impact factor rose above 19. The score can be interpreted as an average, where every article that the journal published in the reporting period (that is, during the years 2019 and 2020) was cited by more than 19 articles in 2021. This impact factor score ranks AJP among the highest not just in the category of psychiatry, but also among all the 21,430 indexed journals in scientific, technical, engineering, and medical publishing. AJP ’s impact factor of 19.242 places it in the top 200 of all journal titles, ahead of 99% of the rest of the publishing world.

The new impact factor for Psychiatric Services rose above 4 to 4.157. Of the journals included in the Health Policy & Services category, Psychiatric Services is the highest ranked mental health journal. Psychiatric Services is also now the #1 mental health journal in the category of Public, Environmental & Occupational Health.

The impact factor for the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences rose this year to 2.891, its highest since 1999. ■

psychiatry research case reports journal impact factor

Register for Free
My account Orders Downloads Address Payment methods Account details
About About Psychiatrist.com About JCP About PCC About CME Institute

Error: Search field were incomplete.

OUR MISSION

To provide lifelong learning for clinicians by offering evidence-based, peer-reviewed scientific information about the diagnosis and treatment of behavioral health and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Editor in Chief profile
Insights Video introduces JCP
Sections and Section Editor Profiles
Editorial Board
Contact JCP Editorial Office
Contact JCP Publications Manager regarding potential submissions and submissions under review
Watch the Insights Video by Leslie Citrome, MD: Demystifying the Manuscript Submission Process
Watch the Insights Video by Joseph F. Goldberg, MD: Applying a Diagnostic Approach to Peer Review
Submit a Manuscript to JCP’s online submission system
JCP Author Form

JCP is indexed by the National Library of Medicine and is printed 4 times per year, with new content published online weekly to bring readers the latest insights.

Manuscripts submitted should deal with the epidemiology, classification, and treatment of psychiatric disorders or development and validity of measurement instruments.

Types of manuscripts published include

Original research
Systematic reviews
Meta-analyses
Case reports and series
Commenting letters to the editor

JCP Statistics and Impact Information

Impact Factor: 5.3 (Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate, 2023)
Submission-to-first decision time (mean): 24 days
Submission-to-acceptance time (mean): 4.4 months
Average number of articles published/issue: 16
Acceptance rate: 22%
World’s most cited independent, indexed, clinical psychiatry journal
Over 33,000 readers of the print journal
Electronic alerts (Elerts) sent to over 35,000 allied mental health professionals who have requested receipt of informational e-mails about our journals and Web CME activities
Over 100,000 registered users of Psychiatrist.com
Nearly 900,000 users per year with over 1.3 million visits at Psychiatrist.com (Google Analytics, June 2021)
Over 33,000 followers on Twitter and over 20,000 followers on Facebook

JCP Print ISSN 0160-6689 | Online ISSN 1555-2101

For additional inquiries, see CONTACT US at the bottom of the page.

Impact of Theta Burst Stimulation on MS

Theta burst stimulation interventions may hold promise in addressing specific multiple scl..., balancing psychiatric stability and cardiometabolic health in bipolar i disorder, dr goldberg takes viewers through two case profiles of patients with bipolar i disorder, including assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, with a focus on cardiometabolic safety., mindfulness, problematic social media use, and anxiety, use of trait mindfulness–based interventions may help reduce anxiety levels in students ..., severity of antipsychotic-induced cervical dystonia by algorithm-based rating system, rater consensus data were compared with deviation angle data using ai-based deviation angl..., psychotic symptoms following ayahuasca use, a 43-year-old woman with no psychiatric history developed schizophreniform psychotic sympt....

Search Articles

Case reports

Annals of General Psychiatry welcomes well-described reports of cases that include the following:

Unreported or unusual side effects or adverse interactions involving medications.
Unexpected or unusual presentations of a disease.
New associations or variations in disease processes.
Presentations, diagnoses and/or management of new and emerging diseases.
An unexpected association between diseases or symptoms.
An unexpected event in the course of observing or treating a patient.
Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect.

Case reports submitted to Annals of General Psychiatry should make a contribution to medical knowledge and must have educational value or highlight the need for a change in clinical practice or diagnostic/prognostic approaches. The journal will not consider case reports describing preventive or therapeutic interventions, as these generally require stronger evidence.

Authors are encouraged to describe how the case report is rare or unusual as well as its educational and/or scientific merits in the covering letter that accompanies the submission of the manuscript.

Annals of General Psychiatry strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s information on recommended repositories .

Authors who need help depositing and curating data may wish to consider uploading their data to Springer Nature’s Research Data Support or contacting our Research Data Support Helpdesk . Springer Nature’s Research Data Support provides data deposition and curation to help authors follow good practice in sharing and archiving of research data, and can be accessed via an online form . The services provide secure and private submission of data files, which are curated and managed by the Springer Nature Research Data team for public release, in agreement with the submitting author. These services are provided in partnership with figshare. Checks are carried out as part of a submission screening process to ensure that researchers who should use a specific community-endorsed repository are advised of the best option for sharing and archiving their data. Use of Research Data Support is optional and does not imply or guarantee that a manuscript will be accepted.