Nuggets: findings shared in multiple clinical case reports

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

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

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.

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.