Journal of Clinical Case Reports and Images About the journal
An ordered record of clinical observation
What the Journal of Clinical Case Reports and Images exists to do, what it publishes, how a case record and its images are handled, and who is accountable for the decisions taken along the way.
What the journal is
Clinical knowledge accumulates in two registers. One is the aggregate: the trial, the cohort, the systematic review, each answering a question about populations. The other is the particular — the patient whose presentation did not fit, the complication nobody had described, the image that changed a working diagnosis. The Journal of Clinical Case Reports and Images serves the second register.
The journal exists so that a single well-observed episode of care can be reviewed by people who were not there, licensed for reuse, given a permanent identifier, and made findable by the next clinician who meets the same problem. That is a narrow purpose, and it is deliberately narrow. A case report is not a small trial and the journal does not treat it as one; it is a complete account of one episode, and it is published when the account is complete enough to be useful to someone else.
JCCI publishes Case Reports, Clinical Images, Case Series and Technical Notes anchored to documented patient care across medicine, surgery and allied clinical specialties. Interdisciplinary cases may connect imaging, pathology, genetics, pharmacotherapy or digital care when the clinical record remains central. A record is read for what it documents rather than for the specialty it arrived from, and the territories from which records are received are set out on the aims and scope page.
Why a case is worth publishing
The case report is the oldest form in the clinical literature and it survives because it does something the aggregate cannot. A cohort study describes what usually happens. A case report describes what happened once, in enough detail that a reader can recognize it the next time, and it is often the first published account of a presentation that later proves not to be rare at all.
The journal reads submissions for the work a case can genuinely do:
- recognition of a rare, atypical, or easily mistaken presentation, described well enough that a colleague elsewhere could identify it;
- the differential a clinician worked through, and the finding that settled it;
- a complication or adverse course that was not anticipated, including those that followed a routine procedure;
- a diagnostic or procedural sequence worth following, with the reasoning left visible rather than compressed into a conclusion;
- an imaging, endoscopic or histological finding that carries the point more directly than a paragraph can;
- an observation specific enough to be tested later — a hypothesis, offered as one.
What a single case does not establish
A case documents one patient's course, and the journal is explicit about where that evidence stops. A single record does not establish that a treatment works, that one thing caused another, how common a presentation is, what a guideline should say, or that an approach is safe in general. Manuscripts are expected to draw conclusions their evidence supports, and editing works toward that limit rather than away from it. A case report that claims efficacy is not a stronger paper; it is a weaker one.
Who the journal is for
The journal is written for people who see patients and for people who prepare others to see patients: physicians and surgeons across the specialties, radiologists and pathologists whose reading turns a finding into a diagnosis, clinicians in training who learn from worked cases before they meet them, and educators who teach from documented examples rather than from constructed ones.
It is also written for its own authors. A well-documented case is frequently the first publication of a resident or a clinician outside an academic center, and the journal's handling assumes that: reviewer comments are expected to say what a report needs in order to be usable, not merely whether it is acceptable.
The second half of the journal's name describes half of its editorial work. Radiological, endoscopic, intraoperative, histological and clinical figures often carry a finding more directly than prose can, and this journal treats them as part of the record rather than as decoration attached to it. An image-led submission is read on the same terms as a narrative one. Clinical Images is a publication format in its own right: the image-led clinical account can carry the contribution without becoming a full-length case report.
That has consequences for how figures are prepared and reviewed. A figure is published with the caption, orientation, modality and interpretive detail a reader needs in order to see what the authors saw; a striking picture without the investigation that qualified it is an anecdote, and it is edited or declined as one. Where a finding depends on a correlation — an imaging appearance against a histological one, a preoperative study against what was found at operation — the journal expects both halves to be shown.
Figure formats, resolution and labeling requirements are set out in the instructions for authors. For clinical video or moving images, authors should confirm supported formats and publication arrangements with the editorial office before submission. Recordings require the same clinical context, interpretation and patient protection as still images.
Every journal of case reports carries an obligation that most journals do not: the material it publishes belongs, in a real sense, to someone who is not the author. The requirements below are the journal's own, they are checked at screening and again before acceptance, and they are stated in full on the editorial policies page and in the instructions for authors.
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Consent for publication
Authors obtain written informed consent from the patient for publication of the case details and images, and include a patient consent statement in the manuscript.
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Identifiable images
Patient-identifiable images and recordings require explicit consent for publication. De-identification alone does not grant permission to publish. Any consent exception requires editorial assessment under applicable policy, law and institutional requirements.
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Ethics approval
Institutional review board or ethics committee approval is required where the work falls within its remit, and is reported in the manuscript.
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Image rights
Authors must hold permission to publish every image. Adapted or reused figures require written permission and a citation to the source.
De-identification is a requirement of the manuscript, not a step in production: names, record numbers, dates of birth, institutional identifiers and any equivalent detail — and the same information where it appears burned into an image or in its embedded metadata — must be removed before a manuscript is submitted. Authors remain subject to the data-protection law of the jurisdiction in which the care was given, and the journal's requirements are additional to it rather than a substitute for it. Competing interests and funding are declared by every author, and post-publication notices may include a correction, expression of concern, retraction or another appropriate notice linked to the original article.
Manuscripts are screened, assigned and decided by named editors rather than by an anonymous office. Senior editorial responsibility rests with the Editor-in-Chief; every member of the board is published with their role, institution and country, and with their ORCID iD where one has been supplied, so a reader can check who is accountable for the journal's decisions.
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Editor-in-Chief
Lalit Gupta
Professor, Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi, New Delhi, India
- Section Editor
Editorial independence is the point of the arrangement rather than a claim about it. An editor who has a competing interest in a manuscript takes no part in its handling, and a manuscript from an editor of the journal is handled by someone else. Editorial decisions are independent of the article processing charge and of any service the publisher offers.
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review. Peer review is single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal. The CARE checklist guides individual case reports; case series describe selection, methods, outcomes and limitations using guidance appropriate to their design. Reviewers assess clinical reasoning, image interpretation and learning value without requiring rarity. Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. Standalone clinical trials are outside the scope of new submissions. Where an eligible case concerns participation in a trial, the publisher's registration requirement applies: Interventional clinical trials must be registered in an accepted public trial registry at or before the first participant provides consent for enrollment. The registry name, registration number, and registration date must be reported in the manuscript.
Accepted articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license and authors retain copyright, so a reader may read, download, redistribute and build on an article provided the authors and the original publication are credited. That matters more than usual here, because a figure from a case report is frequently the part that is reused in teaching. Registered articles carry Crossref DOI identifiers and citation metadata that help readers identify and cite the publication. DOI registration is separate from preservation of the article content.
An article processing charge applies after acceptance only; there is no submission fee, and a rejected manuscript incurs no charge. The current terms are published on the article processing charges page. Where the journal's work is registered and discoverable is set out on the indexing page, which distinguishes journal identifiers and DOI registration from discovery services and from selective journal-level indexing rather than presenting one as another.
The journal at a glance
- Full title
- Journal of Clinical Case Reports and Images
- Abbreviation
- JCCI
- ISSN (electronic)
- 2641-5518
- Publisher
- Open Access Pub
- First volume
- 2017
- Access model
- Open access. Every article is free to read on publication, with no subscription or reader charge.
- License
- CC BY 4.0. Authors retain copyright.
- Persistent identifiers
- Registered articles have Crossref DOI identifiers and citation metadata under the prefix 10.14302.
- Digital preservation
- This journal’s content is committed to Portico, a not-for-profit digital-preservation archive run by ITHAKA (the organization behind JSTOR). As articles are deposited they enter Portico’s permanent archive, so the scholarly record stays available for the long term — even if a title one day ceases to publish.
- Peer review
- Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.
- Core publication formats
- Case Report, Clinical Images, Case Series and Technical Note, each anchored to documented patient care across medicine, surgery and allied clinical specialties.
Where to go next
This page states what the journal is for. Each rule it refers to is published in full on the page that owns it, and the register itself is in the archive. Questions the pages do not answer go to the editorial office at [email protected].
Submit a clinical case or image-led report
JCCI accepts submissions throughout the year in its four core formats. Each should present a documented patient case or related cases with a clear diagnostic, management, procedural, safety or educational contribution.
Submit a manuscript Instructions for authors
Journal of Clinical Case Reports and Images (JCCI) · ISSN 2641-5518 · Crossref DOI prefix 10.14302 · Published open access by Open Access Pub · Content licensed CC BY 4.0, authors retain copyright.