What is the most highly cited case report?
1 Jul, 09 | by Dr Dean Jenkins
One criticism against case reports is that although they are widely read they are not often cited. I’ve therefore been looking for the case report or case series that has the highest number of academic citations.
At the moment the best I’ve found is:
James A.R. Nicoll, David Wilkinson, Clive Holmes, Phil Steart, Hannah Markham & Roy O. Weller. Neuropathology of human Alzheimer disease after immunization with amyloid-beta peptide: a case report. Nature Medicine 9, 448 - 452 (2003)
with 641 citations listed by Google Scholar.
ISI’s Web of Knowledge has the ability of ranking searches by “Times Cited” but I haven’t been able to find one with more citations. PubMed and Highwire don’t seem to have a “sort by number of citations” feature.
I’m sure that some classic cases such as Sydenham’s account of gout or Hippocrates’ description of diabetes have been cited in many hundreds of textbooks alone but how should one judge the world record holder? Should it be the absolute number of citations - in which case Hippocrates has over 2000 years advantage - or the peak number of citations per year?
Arguments about the compatibility of different counts of citation numbers aside … any suggestions for other highly cited case reports would be most welcome.
Heard from the author of the case report which appears to have the most citations.
“Circumstances converged such that a traditional neuropathological examination of a single patient had quite an impact on the evolving field of immunization in Alzheimer’s disease. Being on the interface between science and medicine I was really pleased that such a traditional type of medical/pathological examination can still be this important. I felt the need to employ the services of a professional statistician to be able to say with authority that a study with sample size n=1 does not need statistical analysis! We have also been in the fortunate position to be able to follow up this study with numbers of patients that do justify stats.” Prof James AR Nicoll, Division of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Southampton.
Clearly an influential case and also an interesting debate about the n=1 nature of case reports.
Dr Dean Jenkins
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm