Neutral, risky or provocative? Trends in titling practices in complementary and alternative medicine articles (1995-2016)

Autores/as

  • Françoise Salager-Meyer Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
  • Beverly A. Lewin Tel Aviv University
  • Marianela Luzardo Briceño Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana-Bucaramanga

Palabras clave:

discourse analysis, titles, complementary alternative medicine conventional/allopathic medicine, diachronic

Resumen

This paper analyses the length and titling practices in the under-researched field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).  Our corpus consisted of 360 articles published between 1995 and 2016 in three CAM journals. The length and frequency of Nominal, Verbal and Question titles were compared across genres and over time. A 40% overall title length increase was found. Our study confirms that title length is related to genre, research paper (RP) titles being significantly longer than reviews and case report titles. Moreover, RP titles were found to exhibit the greatest length increase over time. In this study, Nominal titles were the most frequent title type in the three genres and over the 20-year period analyzed, although they slightly decreased over time. In contrast, Verbal (full sentence) titles increased over time, especially in RP titles. Question titles were the only type that significantly increased over time, especially in review article titles. These findings were compared with those obtained by previous titleology research on conventional (CONV) medicine paper titles. We conclude that although CAM and CONV are divergent approaches to health care, their titling practices revealed more similarities than differences. These similarities may reflect a growing tendency towards practices associated with popular media to attract readership, such as use of Question and Verbal titles. This competition for attention could have serious implications for health care if the trend increases for clinicians to rely on the titles of relevant articles to make therapeutic decisions.

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Biografía del autor/a

Françoise Salager-Meyer, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Françoise Salager-Meyer was educated at the University of Lyons, France, and the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of numerous publications on written medical discourse, mostly from a diachronic, cross-linguistic and cross-generic perspective. In 1994 and 2004, she was awarded the Horowitz Prize for her works on the pragmatics of written scholarly communication. She was the section editor of the “Language and Medicine section” of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Elsevier) and is currently coordinating the Research Group on Medical Discourse Analysis (University of The Andes, Graduate School of Medicine, Mérida, Venezuela).

Beverly A. Lewin, Tel Aviv University

Beverly A. Lewin. Her research has mainly focused on genre analysis and on the interpersonal aspects of scientific discourse. Publications include: Expository Discourse: A Genre-Based Approach to Social Science Texts, with J. Fine and L. Young (2001); Writing Readable Research: A Guide for Students of Social Science (2010); Crossed Words: Criticism in Scholarly Writing, co-edited with F. Salager-Meyer (2011); and Abstract quality in complementary and alternative medicine papers: a structural and cross-generic analysis, with F. Salager-Meyer and María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza (2014), In Marina Bondi and Rosa Lorès-Sanz (eds.) Abstracts in Academic Discourse: Variation and Change. Bern: Peter Lang. Her articles include Contentiousness in Science: the Discourse of Critique in Two Sociology Journals, TEXT (2005), and, with H. Perpignan, Recruiting the Reader in Literary Criticism, Text & Talk (2012).

Marianela Luzardo Briceño, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana-Bucaramanga

Marianela Luzardo Briceño hold an MA in applied statistics and a PhD in statistics from the University of the Andes (Mérida, Venezuela). She has been teaching statistics at that same Institution in both undergraduate and graduate levels for over twenty years. She has published several articles in applied statistics on artificial intelligence and data mining in international journals. She is currently working at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Bucaramanga, Colombia).

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Publicado

2017-12-05

Cómo citar

Salager-Meyer, F., Lewin, B. A., & Luzardo Briceño, M. (2017). Neutral, risky or provocative? Trends in titling practices in complementary and alternative medicine articles (1995-2016). Revista De Lenguas Para Fines Específicos, 23(2), 263–289. Recuperado a partir de https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/927

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Vol. 23 Núm. 2 (2017): Revista de lenguas para fines específicos

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