Foreword to the “Case Studies in Scientometrics” special issues

Case study is a time honored form of scientific publication. It ‘‘has long had a prominent place in many disciplines and professions, ranging from psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science to education, clinical science, social work, and administrative science’’ (Wikipedia with reference to Mills et al. 2010 and Yin 2014). In the medical literature, a major part of such studies are published as ‘‘case reports’’. Although some authors try to make a distinction between the two, usually claiming that case studies should add an element of analysis to the mere descriptive character of the reports, there is a general consensus on the equivalence of the two terms (see, e.g., Crowe et al. 2011): both present anecdotal evidences based on a single case or on a non-representative small sample. The number of both publication types apparently shows dynamic growth. Figure 1 shows the growth rate of papers having the respective terms in their titles as included in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science Core Collection database. By the 2000’s, the doubling time of case studies is as short as 6 years. The growth curve of case reports seems to flatten by the 2010’s. The vast majority of the papers with ‘‘case-study’’ in their titles are actual case studies. Strikingly, some of the most cited papers among them are not case studies but papers about case studies (so to say, ‘‘meta-case-studies’’), similarly to the present Editorial. A rather highly cited such ‘‘meta-case-study’’ paper helps a lot in defining the role of case studies in