Reply to "Searching the Medical Literature for Case Reports"

Because this piece does not have an abstract, we have provided for your benefit the first 3 sentences of the full text.

The elements of a minimum literature search for the purposes of writing a case report are illustrated below by applying them to Relan and colleagues’ case. First, a MEDLINE search using the search terms as "textwords" should be conducted. When I used PubMed to search MEDLINE on May 1, 2003, the terms priapism and risperidone, with no qualifiers, resulted in 15 citations. Thirteen of these were unique case reports in which priapism/prolonged erection was attributed wholly or partly to risperidone.^1-13