ArticleBMC medical research methodology2026
Creating an indexing scheme for case series articles.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Creating an indexing scheme for case series articles.BMC medical research methodology · 2026Article
- A Similarity Metric, Rubric and Unified Hierarchy for Biomedical Publication Types and Study Designs.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- A similarity metric, rubric, and unified hierarchy for biomedical publication types and study designs.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2026Article
- Goals and strategies for the indexing of publication types and study designs.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesCase reports and case series articles comprise a significant portion of the biomedical literature, yet unlike case reports, the National Library of Medicine does not index case series as a Publication Type. This hurts clinicians’ and researchers’ ability to retrieve, identify and analyze evidence from this type of study. MATERIALS AND
methodsPubMed articles mentioning “case series” in title or abstract were characterized to learn what are considered to be case series by the authors themselves. We then set aside articles better indexed as other standard publication types – case reports, cohort studies, reviews and clinical trials -- as well as those that discuss (rather than report the results of) case series articles, to create a corpus of typical case series articles. A random sample of these articles was evaluated by two annotators who confirmed that the great majority (88%) satisfy a formal definition of “case series”.
resultsThe corpus was utilized in an automated transformer-based machine learning indexing model. Case series performance of this model on hold-out data was excellent (precision = 0.887, recall = 0.952, F1 = 0.918, PR-AUC = 0.941) and manual evaluation of 100 articles tagged as “case series” revealed that 88% satisfied a formal definition of case series. DISCUSSION AND
conclusionThis study demonstrates the feasibility of automatically indexing case series articles. Indexing should enhance their discoverability, and hence their medical value, for evidence synthesis groups as well as clinicians and general users of the biomedical literature.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.