New - Journal Of Radiology Case Reports

Main Category: Radiology / Nuclear Medicine
Article Date: 27 Aug 2008 - 2:00 PDT

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The Journal of Radiology Case Reports" is a new generation of interactive journals, which is dedicated to Radiology case reports. Multiple nationally and internationally well renowned experts in the field of Radiology (RSNA, ARRS, ACR, ECR etc.) represent the editorial board to guarantee the highest quality of publications.

The peer review and editorial process conforms to international standards of peer reviewed, scientific journals. However there are significant differences:

- Interactivity is unique and allows to view the cases as seen on workstations - with scroll functions and the ability to "window and level". An example can be seen in the following case report of the July issue.

Traditionally, case reports provide only selected images, which demonstrate the pathology or pertinent findings. This has not only a limited educational and practical value, because the user only receives selected information and cannot "find out" the answer on his own. But, what is more important is that this kind of provided information does not resemble the "real life" at the radiologist's (or other physician's) workstation. After a diagnostic exam has been opened, the pathology does present immediately on the first image to the examiner. The entire stack of images needs to be scrolled through and the examiner has to find the pathology himself. Furthermore, scrolling through the stack of images helps to obtain an overview of the entire environment, including the anatomical relationship. To this time, no journal was able to provide such interactive features. The Journal of Radiology Case Reports, however, offers as the first journal of its kind such an opportunity. In addition, it also offers to review the articles in several other modes, including reading the manuscript in the traditional, static way, e.g. for pint purposes.

- This journal is dedicated to Radiology case reports. Case reports are usually "neglected" by large or traditional journals, mainly due to competition with "higher value" articles (review, original research etc.) for valuable space in the hardcopy version of the journal. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly difficult to publish interesting findings in a peer-reviewed scientific environment. However, the importance of case reports is widely underestimated, since many studies, reviews and evidence based medicine are based on single or collected case reports in the literature. This was one reason, why this online journal was born: to give the opportunity to publish Radiology case reports.

- The review process is blinded and exceptional by taking usually no more than 7 days - compared to months (and even years with revisions) in traditional journals, which can be very frustrating for authors.

- As in traditional journals, the published cases are fully citable. Each article receives a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) number - In these days every up-to-date journal assigns its articles a DOI number for easier referencing.

- Medline/PubMed indexing of the journal is in process.

- The articles are available in multiple formats (Abstract, HTML, PDF, Interactive)

- The editorial team consists of nationally and internationally well renowned experts in the field of Radiology.

Journal of Radiology Case Reports