DENTAL CASE REPORT FOR PUBLICATION; STEP BY STEP

Since Hippocrates, case reports have provided a rich resource for teaching and research in medicine. Case reports are published by many prominent journals—with more than 170,000 case reports are indexed in MEDLINE from 1996 till today, and a number of narrative guidelines for the preparation of case reports have appeared in the medical literature. To facilitate the preparation of case reports, we reviewed the existing guidelines and a random sampling of published case reports and created a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet for dentists, and dental specialists to use to capture unique scientific observations. Although originally developed to assist family practice residents to write case reports, the case report worksheet can be used by physicians in any practice setting and any discipline to collect and report interesting, unusual, or newsworthy cases.