Teaching CARE Case Report Guidelines to Improve Authors' Publication Success

Purpose: This talk describes a method to teach the use of the CARE Case Report Guidelines to faculty, residents, fellows, students and others writing case reports at a large health care system. Setting/participants/resources: Our library serves approximately 100,000 teammates who provide patient care in two states. The organization has 60 residency and fellowship programs with 785 residents/fellows. Many faculty also serve as preceptors for medical students who participate in clinical rotations in our teaching hospitals. Brief description: Clinicians write case reports for multiple reasons but may find it challenging to get their case reports accepted for publication. While there can be many factors in why a manuscript is not accepted for publication, the library team suggested that our case report authors could benefit from training on the guidelines that support the publication of accurate, complete and transparent case reports. This talk describes our presentation to teach the adoption of the CARE Case Report Guidelines and accompanying checklist. The checklist information was presented in the order which the author would normally construct their manuscript rather than the order of the checklist. The presentation also included additional tips for authors to support their success at getting their manuscripts accepted for publication.