Radiologists as co-authors in case reports: does their involvement make a difference?

Background Due to their crucial role in many diagnostic processes, a considerable number of papers in non-radiological medical journals contain images. We noticed that radiologists are seldom mentioned as co-authors. Purpose To investigate how often radiologists are involved as co-authors and to measure the influence of their involvement on the choice and quality of the illustrations and captions. Material and Methods We queried PubMed for papers in English with the search string "case report" in the title, examined them for the presence of radiological images, and excluded those published in radiological journals. We developed a scoring system, containing objective and subjective qualification criteria. In addition, we checked if a radiologist was involved as co-author, or mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. We performed a statistical analysis to check if the involvement of a radiologist had a significant effect on the overall quality of the case report. Results In 21% (45/218) of the papers, a radiologist was mentioned as co-author and in 3% (7/218) a radiologist was mentioned in the acknowledgments. In 76% (166/218), radiologists were neither involved as co-authors, nor mentioned in acknowledgments. We found statistically significant quality differences between these three groups (P <0.001). Conclusion This study indicated that the quality of case reports can be improved when radiologists are involved in the preparation and publication of papers containing imaging studies.