Original scientific paper
Titles are "serious stuff": a historical study of academic titles
Françoise Salager-Meyer
; Graduate School of Medicine, Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela
María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza
; Department of English Studies, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain
Abstract
In this paper we carried out a diachronic analysis (1840-2009) of a corpus of 180 medical case report titles drawn from the British Medical Journal. We analyzed a series of quantitative variables (number of authors and their institutional affiliation, title length, and punctuation/grammatical data) and qualitative variables (authors’ collaboration and types of titles). The results of our research show various shifts over the period studied that could be attributed to
the following factors: 1) the progressive professionalization of medicine; 2) the need of disciplinary teams to conduct an ever-increasing complex research; and 3) the increased specialization
and the growing complexity of medical science. The only variable that has remained constant over the years is the nominal nature of case report titles. It could then be stated that case report titles would distinguish themselves from research article titles, which are being
characterized by a certain tendency towards verbalization.
Keywords
English; medicine; case reports; titles; diachronic analysis
Hrčak ID:
110351
URI
Publication date:
1.5.2013.
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