Fax +41 61 306 12 34 E-Mail karger@karger.ch www.karger.com Letter to the Editor nique (e.g. music therapy, bodypacking, wilderness therapy, etc. were not included), (3) the case study is either the focus of the ar- ticle or an illustrative vignette of sufficient size (more than 50% of the publication or longer than five pages), (4) the case study is written in English, French, or German, and (5) the case study presents an original analysis of therapeutic data. Four hundred and fifty-three cases were selected according to these criteria. The full text of 8 cases could not be obtained. The full texts of the re- maining 445 articles were screened with the Inventory of Basic Information in Single Cases (IBISC), an ad hoc constructed in- ventory that assesses the presence of basic information on re- search method, patient, therapist, and therapy. The IBISC, the IBISC manual, and the full results of the screening are available at www.singlecasearchive.com. What follows is a concise over- view of salient results of the screening. Methodological Characteristics Eighty-eight percent of the cases were clinical single cases (i.e. cases using no systematic qualitative or quantitative method), and 12% of the cases were empirical single cases (i.e. cases using sys- tematic quantitative and/or qualitative analysis). Figure 1 shows that the number of both naturalistic and empirical single cases has progressively increased throughout the years. The number of single cases also increased proportionally to the total number of studies published in psychology and psychoanalysis. In 52% of the cases, the case description was the focus of the article; in 48% of the cases, the case description was presented as an illustration in the course of a theoretical paper. In 64% of the cases, the case study focused exclusively on the patient; in 48% of Single case studies are quintessential for psychoanalytic theo- ry, research, and practice. To facilitate the exploitation of the field of single case research, we constructed an online archive of psy- choanalytic single case studies published in ISI-ranked journals (freely accessible at www.singlecasearchive.com after receiving a username and password). The construction of the archive started from a search on ISI Web of Knowledge using the term ‘(psychoanal * OR psychody- nam *) AND (case OR vignette)’ across the complete range of pub- lication years (1955–2011). This procedure yielded 2,760 hits. Four researchers screened all abstracts and/or full article texts, to select case studies according to the following criteria: (1) the case study concerns individual psychoanalytic treatment, (2) the case study can be qualified as ‘psychoanalytic’ in terms of therapeutic tech- Received: July 6, 2012 Accepted after revision: July 19, 2012 Published online: December 22, 2012 © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel 0033–3190/13/0822–0120$38.00/0 Accessible online at: www.karger.com/pps Psychother Psychosom 2013;82:120–121 DOI: 10.1159/000342019 Psychoanalytic Single Cases Published in ISI-Ranked Journals: The Construction of an Online Archive Mattias Desmet a , Reitske Meganck a , Carolina Seybert a , Jochem Willemsen a , Filip Geerardyn a , Frédéric Declercq a , Ruth Inslegers a , Eline Trenson a , Stijn Vanheule a , Lewis Kirschner b , Isabelle Schindler c , Horst Kächele c a Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; b Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass., USA; c International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin, Germany Mattias Desmet Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University H. Dunantlaan 2, BE–9000 Ghent (Belgium) E-Mail Mattias.Desmet  @  UGent.be 0 10 20 30 Count 1955 1964 1967 1968 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1980 1981 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Year published Clinical cases Empirical cases Fig. 1. Number of clinical and empirical single cases published per year from 1955 until 2011.