Open access (OA) publisher BioMed Central has launched a new semantically-enriched search tool, Cases Database, which aims to enhance the discovery, filtering and aggregation of medical case reports from many journals. OA to journal articles published under Creative Commons licences, which permit text mining, enable the literature to be reused as a resource for scientific discovery. BioMed is seeking collaborations with other publishers to facilitate text mining and help make case reports a more valuable part of the literature. More than 11,000 cases are reportedly available to be freely searched with Cases Database.
Cases Database uses text mining and medical term recognition to filter peer reviewed medical case reports and provide a semantically enriched search experience. The database offers structured search and filtering by condition, symptom, intervention, pathogen, patient demographic and many other data fields, allowing fast identification of relevant case reports to support clinical practice and research. Registered users can save cases, set up e-mail alerts tonew cases matching their search terms, and export their results. Cases Database will be free to access and is expected to be of particular interest to practicing clinicians, researchers, lecturers, drug regulators, patients, students and authors.
In the years following the launch of BioMed Central's Journal of Medical Case Reports, the number of new journals publishing case reports has grown rapidly, with new titles from BMJ Group, Elsevier, Hindawi, Dove Press and others. This reportedly suggests a shift in perceptions of the value of case reports in the peer-reviewed literature. With this explosion of new journals dedicated to case reporting – and the thousands of case reports which are published across other clinical medical journals – Cases Database could become an even more powerful tool, it is felt.
Journals such as Journal of Medical Case Reports help overcome the problem of case reports often being relegated to eviscerated letter formats, or being rejected from journals because of their likelihood to attract few citations, and so potentially damage a journal's Impact Factor. The more case reports that are included in Cases Database the more useful the database is; the more useful individual cases potentially are; and the more visible publishers become who contribute content to the database. Therefore, BioMed is looking for more journals and publishers who would like to include their authors' case reports in the database.
Publishers including their content in Cases Database can expect increased visibility and usage of their content, as all cases in Cases Database link to the full text version of the case report on the publisher's website.
The original publisher's copyright and licence information is indexed and displayed by Cases Database and cases from OA and subscription content can be included. Case reports published by OA publishers which use the Creative Commons attribution license permitting commercial use (CC-BY), and deposit their articles in PubMed Central, need do little to ensure their authors' content included in Cases Database.
