Q: Can I publish a case report about a medicine's side effect although two similar cases have been reported?
A rare adverse reaction occurred on a patient who was administered a medicine. When I search on PubMed, I cannot find any similar case. But when I made an inquiry with the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the medicine, I was informed that two cases have been reported at post-marketing surveillance (100% survey instead of sample survey). (Details have not been disclosed.)
Can I write a case report for this case and publish it?
Please do a thorough literature survey on PubMed, Google Scholar, DOAJ, Ingenta Connect, and other databases to ensure that the pharmaceutical company has not published these cases that they have mentioned.
You could ask the pharmaceutical company for more details about the two cases if they are willing to disclose the required information. If these two cases from the survey have been published, then the novelty of your case report would be limited and journals will likely not consider your case report as being unique and of clinical importance; hence it is imperative that you have details regarding the publication of the two cases.
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This content belongs to the Conducting Research Stage