About AME Case Reports

AME Case Reports

Overview and identity

AME Case Reports is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal devoted entirely to clinical case reports, published from Hong Kong by AME Publishing Company. It is abbreviated ACR and AME Case Rep, carries online ISSN 2523-1995, and is hosted at acr.amegroups.org. Its stated purpose, repeated in its author guidelines and announcements, is to publish original and educationally valuable case reports in all medical disciplines, providing clinical information on common and rare cases for healthcare professionals, researchers and others.

The journal is published by AME Publishing Company with support from Wolters Kluwer, under which its content is made available on Wolters Kluwer Health's Lippincott and Ovid platforms. Its National Library of Medicine catalogue record gives its NLM ID as 101730832, reflecting its indexing in the United States National Library of Medicine system through PubMed Central. It is one of the three AME-branded flagship titles of its publisher, alongside AME Medical Journal for general medicine and AME Surgical Journal for surgery.

Launch in September 2017

The journal was launched in September 2017. Its founding document is the editorial Welcome to the AME Case Reports, written by Zhigang Cao and published as the journal's first article, AME Case Reports 2017;1:1, with DOI 10.21037/acr.2017.09.01. The editorial is archived in PubMed Central as PMCID PMC6155719, with PMID 30263988, so the journal's launch can be verified independently of the publisher's own website, in the permanent biomedical literature archive.

In the editorial Cao announced the launch of the new journal and described himself as honoured to serve as its first editor-in-chief, working with a team of editorial board members and experienced editors. He presented the launch of ACR as an open-access journal as a significant step in making case-based clinical knowledge freely available. Case reports occupy a distinctive place in medical literature: they document unusual presentations, rare diseases, unexpected treatment responses and complications that larger studies may never capture, and a dedicated open-access venue gives such reports a permanent, citable home.

Editorial model: submitted and referred cases

The journal's model, set out at its launch and reflected in the clean record for this profile, combines two sources of content. It publishes spontaneously submitted case reports sent directly by clinicians, and it also receives cases referred from AME's wider family of more than forty supporter journals. A case that arrives at a specialty AME journal but is better suited to a dedicated case-report venue can therefore be redirected to ACR rather than lost to the literature. That referral arrangement is a practical advantage of publishing a case journal inside a large multi-journal publishing house.

At launch the journal was free to readers and to authors, a term the founding record emphasises. Its reporting expectations follow the established standards for case reporting: the publisher maintains case-report and case-series checklists adapted from the CARE checklist for case reports and the PROCESS checklist for surgical case series, requiring authors to identify the diagnosis or intervention of primary focus, to explain what is unique about the case and what it adds to the scientific literature, and to describe methods, findings and outcomes in a structured way. Those checklists, hosted by the publisher, show the journal applying recognised reporting guidelines rather than accepting unstructured anecdotes.

Scope across all medical disciplines

ACR's scope is deliberately unrestricted by specialty. It publishes case reports across all medical disciplines, for clinicians and researchers dealing with both common and rare cases. A common case may be educationally valuable because of an instructive diagnostic error, an unusual course or a teaching point about standard care; a rare case may be valuable simply because the condition is seldom documented at all. The journal's criterion, in its own formulation, is that reports be original and educationally valuable.

That breadth makes the journal a general clinical resource rather than a specialty one. Its archive in PubMed Central contains reports from internal medicine, surgery, oncology, paediatrics and many other fields, all under a single title and ISSN. For a clinician searching the literature for prior reports of an unusual presentation, a dedicated, PubMed Central-indexed case journal is a natural place to look, and for an author with a single instructive case, it is a natural place to submit, since no specialty fit is required.

Indexing in PubMed Central and Web of Science

The journal is indexed by PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC) and by the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). PubMed Central archiving means its full-text articles are held in the United States National Library of Medicine's permanent archive and are freely readable there, as the founding editorial's PMC record demonstrates. PubMed indexing places its reports in the first database most clinicians search.

The journal announced in 2022 that it had been indexed in ESCI in May 2022, and that, following Clarivate's decision to award Journal Impact Factors to all Web of Science Core Collection journals in the 2023 Journal Citation Reports, ACR would receive its first impact factor in June 2023. Its author guidelines record an impact factor of 0.7 for 2024 and its latest impact factor as 0.6 for 2025. Those are small figures, as is normal for case-report journals, whose articles are individually instructive but less frequently cited than trials or reviews, but they confirm the journal's standing inside the formal citation system.

Publication frequency and growth

For most of its life the journal published quarterly, four issues a year. Directory records counted 142 articles published in 2025, a substantial annual volume for a case-report title and evidence of a growing submission flow. To accommodate that growth, the journal announced that from January 2026 it would move from quarterly to bimonthly publication, with regular publication months of January, March, May, July, September and November.

The frequency announcement, published by the editorial office, framed the change explicitly as a response to a rising volume of high-quality submissions and sustained support from authors and the academic community, intended to ensure that practice-relevant research reaches readers with minimal delay after acceptance. A move from four to six issues a year, nine years after launch, is a concrete, checkable indicator that the journal is active and expanding rather than dormant, a distinction that matters for a directory profile of a young online-only title.

The publisher and its journal family

AME Publishing Company, the journal's publisher, was founded in Hong Kong in July 2009 by Stephen Wang and publishes more than sixty medical journals. ACR's place in that family is structural: the publisher's third-anniversary editorial for AME Medical Journal described AMJ, ACR and the then-forthcoming AME Surgical Journal as together epitomising the publisher's three focuses on medicine, clinical cases and surgery. ACR is thus not an incidental title but one of the three name-bearing pillars around which the publisher organised its general, as opposed to specialty, publishing.

AME also maintains a group of PubMed-indexed journals of which ACR is one, and its publisher-level page for those journals repeats ACR's description and indexing in the same terms as the journal's own site. The consistency of the record across the journal site, the publisher's pages, PubMed Central, the NLM catalogue and Web of Science announcements gives this profile a firmer evidential base than an aims-and-scope page alone would provide.

Readership and use

The journal's readers are practising clinicians first of all: doctors who encounter an unusual case and search for comparable published reports, trainees assembling case-based learning, and researchers who use collections of case reports to identify patterns in rare diseases, adverse events and treatment responses. Its open-access model, with full text in PubMed Central, means none of those readers faces a paywall, which is particularly valuable for clinicians in institutions without large subscription budgets.

Its authors are correspondingly diverse, ranging from individual clinicians reporting a single instructive patient to teams at academic centres documenting rare conditions. The journal's acceptance of cases referred from sister journals also makes it a receiving venue for authors who first approached a specialty title. Educational value, rather than statistical power or novelty of method, is the currency of the journal, and its guidelines and checklists are written accordingly.

Assessment

On its verifiable record, AME Case Reports is an established specialist in a single article type. It has a dated, archived founding editorial from September 2017 naming its first editor-in-chief, Zhigang Cao; permanent archiving in PubMed Central from its first article onward; ESCI indexing from May 2022; recorded impact factors of 0.7 for 2024 and 0.6 for 2025; 142 articles published in 2025; and a documented move to bimonthly publication from January 2026. That is a substantive publishing history, sufficient to support this profile without any reliance on promotional claims.

For users of this directory, the essential facts are these. AME Case Reports, ACR, AME Case Rep, online ISSN 2523-1995, is an open-access, peer-reviewed online case-report journal launched in September 2017, published in Hong Kong by AME Publishing Company with Wolters Kluwer support, indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central and Web of Science ESCI, quarterly until 2025 and bimonthly from January 2026, and available at acr.amegroups.org.