Nuggets: findings shared in multiple clinical case reports

Objective

The researchers assessed prevalence in the clinical case report literature of multiple reports independently reporting the same (or nearly the same) main finding.

Methods

Results from forty-five PubMed queries were examined for incidence and features of main findings (“nuggets”) shared in at least four case reports.

Results

The authors found that nuggets are surprisingly prevalent and large in the case report literature, the largest found so far was reported in seventeen articles. In most cases, the main findings of case reports were evident from examining titles alone.

Conclusions

Our curated examples should serve as gold standards for developing specific automated methods for finding nuggets. Nuggets potentially enable finding-based (instead of topic-based) information retrieval.