About the journal

Focus and Scope

The European Journal of Case Reports in Internal Medicine is an official journal of the European Federation of Internal Medicine (EFIM), representing 36 national societies from 34 European countries.

The Journal's mission is to promote the best medical practice and innovation in the field of acute and general medicine. It also provides a forum for internal medicine doctors where they can share new approaches with the aim of improving diagnostic and clinical skills in this field.

EJCRIM welcomes high-quality case reports describing unusual or complex cases that an internist may encounter in everyday practice. The cases should either demonstrate the appropriateness of a diagnostic/therapeutic approach, describe a new procedure or maneuver, or show unusual manifestations of a disease or unexpected reactions. The Journal only accepts and publishes those case reports whose learning points provide new insight and/or contribute to advancing medical knowledge both in terms of diagnostics and therapeutic approaches. Case reports of medical errors, therefore, are also welcome as long as they provide innovative measures on how to prevent them in the current practice (Instructive Errors).
The Journal may also consider brief and reasoned reports on issues relevant to the practice of Internal Medicine, as well as Abstracts submitted to the scientific meetings of acknowledged medical societies.

EJCRIM utilizes the CNR-SOLAR system to permanently archive the Journal for purposes of preservation of research, and it is also indexed on PubMed Central, Scopus, Google Scholar, DOAJ, HINARI and COPE

Publication fee is 300€ + 22% VAT (366€ tax incl., starting from 01/09/2022), which merely covers publication costs such as copyediting fees, indexing costs, promotion and general maintenance of the content of the Journal. The publication fee is only payable if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review. By no means does EJCRIM act for profit.

The Journal is peer-reviewed using a single-blind review process. The educational value of case reports is one of the scopes of the Journal. Its content is freely accessible to all.

The policy and scope of the journal are outlined in an Editorial by the Editor in Chief John Kellett, MD, which is quoted herebelow.

"Modern medicine began in the last half of the nineteenth century when doctors started practising the scientific method at the bedside. However, in his presidential address to the Association of American Physicians in 1979 James Wyngaarden postulated that the clinical scientist was an endangered species[1]. Several reasons for this have been suggested, including "the seductive incomes that now derive from procedure-based specialty medicine". Others have suggested that it is simply because the things left to be discovered at the bedside have become exhausted, and that all the big medical advances will now be made by high-powered institutions. This may not, however, be the case. Some of the major advances in medicine, such as the role of Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer disease, are still made by bedside clinicians. Furthermore, how are "high-powered" institutions going to do any medical research if there are no more doctors interested in research?

One very simple reason why fewer doctors are interested in clinical research is that it is difficult to get started. For the last twenty years or so this has become more difficult to do. Since case reports do not increase a journal's impact factor most journals are now reluctant to publish them. 

Happily things have moved on, and the paradigm of medical publishing is rapidly changing from expensive paper publications with limited capacity, to cheap electronic publications of unlimited capacity the costs of which most authors will find affordable. In this new world it is becoming increasingly clear that open access papers on the internet are much more likely to be cited and read. European Federation of Internal Medicine has, therefore, launched an electronic open access Journal called the European Journal of Case Reports in Internal Medicine.

This journal is a sister publication to European Journal of Internal Medicine and provides a forum for internal medicine doctors to report interesting cases, or a series or cluster of cases. All papers submitted to the journal will be peer reviewed. 

Potential authors should consider the following caveats before submitting a paper to the journal:

  1. Are they reporting something likely to be of interest to most of their colleagues?
  2. Have they got some photographs, x-rays, CT scans of other material that illustrates their findings?
  3. Is there anything new that is not already easily available on the internet?
  4. Is their report to easy to read, and have they been a brief as possible?
  5. Have you read the Journal's Instructions to Authors?"

References

  1. Wyngaarden, J.B. The clinical investigator as an endangered species. N Engl J Med 1979; 301: 1254–1259