Guizzardi, S.; Colangelo, M.T.; Mirandola, P.; Galli, C. Tracing the Evolution of Reviews and Research Articles in the Biomedical Literature: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Abstracts. Publications2024, 12, 2.
Guizzardi, S.; Colangelo, M.T.; Mirandola, P.; Galli, C. Tracing the Evolution of Reviews and Research Articles in the Biomedical Literature: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Abstracts. Publications 2024, 12, 2.
Guizzardi, S.; Colangelo, M.T.; Mirandola, P.; Galli, C. Tracing the Evolution of Reviews and Research Articles in the Biomedical Literature: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Abstracts. Publications2024, 12, 2.
Guizzardi, S.; Colangelo, M.T.; Mirandola, P.; Galli, C. Tracing the Evolution of Reviews and Research Articles in the Biomedical Literature: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Abstracts. Publications 2024, 12, 2.
Abstract
We have previously reported on the diachronical changes in the narrative structure of research articles (RAs) and review manuscripts, using corpora of abstracts from MEDLINE. The present study investigates 5 linguistic dimensions (D1-5) of the text, following Biber’s well established Multimensional Analysis, on the same corpora, to assess how writing practices have changed in these two biomedical literature sub-genres over the years. Our analysis encompassed a sample of more than 1.2 million subtracts from manuscripts that were published over the course of more than 30 years. Both RAs and reviews have reinforced their informational, emotionally detached tone (D1), and have progressively refrained from the use of narrative devices (D2), while increasing their context-independent content (D3). Both RAs and reviews have displayed low levels of overt persuasion (D4), while steering away from abstract content to focus on a more marked author agency and identity adfirmation. When the linguistic features that underly these 5 dimensions are compared, it becomes apparent that RAs and review papers have often changed quite independently, both usually converging to standardized stylistic canons.
Keywords
Abstract; Narrativity; Scientific Publishing
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
