Health Science Case Reports provide a detailed account of the symptoms, signs, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of a single patient or a small sample size of human or animal participants. They are professional narratives that provide feedback on clinical practice guidelines and offer a framework for early signals of effectiveness, adverse events, and cost. These documents are meant to provide a resource for practitioners who wish to identify cases like those they are treating in their own practice, researchers who wish to identify areas for further study, or epidemiologists who wish to identify emerging diseases or regional health concerns. SSRN helps with the discovery of these resources by providing a platform for the sharing of early-stage case reports in the Health Science Case Reports Research Network (HSCaseRepRN) while also revealing connections with similar areas of research such as medicine, chemistry, biology, and nursing, among others. The case reports in this network include preliminary findings or unique cases where the diagnosis or treatment may or may not be applicable to a larger cohort and the results may still be inconclusive.
Many of the papers included in the Health Science Case Reports Research Network are preprints: early stage research papers that have not been peer-reviewed. The findings should not be used for clinical or public health decision making and should not be presented to a lay audience without highlighting that they are preliminary and have not been peer-reviewed.