Summaries are common in all kinds of writing. They highlight the major points in a piece and outline the significant details. In academic writing, papers also begin with a summary which receives the name of abstract. On average, abstracts have a fairly standard form, but, according to their type, they may also show some differences. According to Swales and Feak (1994, cited in Pintos & Crimi, 2010), there are RP abstracts and conference abstracts. “ For the first type of abstract, there is a text to work from, the one you have already written, whereas for the second type, there may or may not be a text to refer back” (Pintos and Crimi, 2010, p.12). In this paper, abstracts from four different articles in the medicine field, three from The British Medical Journal (BMJ) and one from The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), will be analyzed on a comparison-contrast basis.
The BMJ articles share the same appearance layout as the three of them are written in two text columns . The Abstract (A) section is on the left , its heading written in colour block letters.This section is all written in Arial font , whereas the rest of the sections in the paper are written in Times New Roman. This may be the pattern for BMJ´s requirements regarding abstracts submission. They are informative structured abstracts with bolded subheadings that , on average, identify the main sections in the RA. However, there are some differences regarding the addition of a ‘Main outcome measure’ subheading in two of the articles. This insertion may be due to the relevance of the outcome in the research carried out. This subsection does not contain a sentence but a phrase instead. This characteristic does not seem to be in keeping with one of the linguistic specifications of abstracts provided by Graetz (1985, cited in Swales & Feak,1998, p.212, cited in Pintos & Crimi, 2010) which states that full sentence should be used. All the other subheadings – Objective(O), Design(D), Setting(S), Participants(P), Results(R), Conclusions(C) - are full sentences. However , the O sentence is grammatically different from the rest because it starts with a full infinitive , typical of sentence in these sections.
The three articles follow the results-driven approach (Swales & Feak, 1994, cited in Pintos & Crimi, 2010) with an outstanding longer ‘Results’ subsection. Conversely, some differences among the three articles can be observed. In the article by Jorgensen, Zahl, & Gotzsche (2010) and Wijeysundera, et al. (2010) the description of results takes up five sentences . The information in them is full of numerals and abbreviations. Conversely, the article by Martinez, Assimes, Mines, Dell´Aniello & Suissa (2010) contains a shorter ‘Results’ subsection but the numerals refer to the number of participants in the study. This might be the reason why the ‘Participants’ (P) subsection is longer. The researchers might have felt the need to include P´s infortmation to support the results obtained. A feature that all the other subsections share in the three articles share is that they remain relatively short, made up of one or two sentences.
Regarding voice, it may be stated that passive voice constitutes the pattern with the highest frequency of usage throughout . But, it can also be noted that, in the article by Martinez, Assimes, Mines, Dell´Aniello & Suissa (2010) and in the article by Jorgensen, Zahl, & Gotzsche (2010) there exist some sentences with the pronoun ‘we’ functioning as subject . Passive voice usage has been controversial in the medicine field for long. As Pintos & Crimi (2010) point out “ In medicine, when the agent is not stated, there is no one to take responsibility for the actions that are carried out. This lack of responsibility is one of the reasons [ why ] medical writers are told to avoid the passive. Another reason is that in medicine , physicians tend to overuse the passive , thus making the text seem artificially formal and uninteresting” ( p.39 ).
“(…) Traditionally, the American Psychological Association ( APA) dictated that academic writing had to be carried out in an impersonal form, not using the pronouns “I” or “We”. Nevertheless, one of the major changes in APA format is that, in a co-authored paper you can use ‘I’ or ‘We’ ” (p. 40 ). It might be that researchers alternate in the use of active ‘we’ and passive voice to make their work accessible to a wider audience without losing the formality achieved by passive voice usage.
The BMJ articles meet the requirements proposed by Graetz (1985, cited in Swales, 1990, cited in Pintos & Crimi, 2010) concerning past tense usage. Swales (1990, cited in Pintos & Crimi, 2010) argues that RP abstracts are characterized by the use of past tense. Almost all the sentences, whether active or passive, are written in the past tense because they refer to the research previously carried out. It is the usual tense in these type of abstracts. Conversely, proposal abstracts “should be written in the future form because the reasearch has not been implemented yet”. (Pintos & Crimi, 2010, p. 37 )
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article , in contrast to the BMJ articles, has a different appearance layout. The word ‘abstract’ is centered and written in black block letters.The subheadings in the section are also written in block letters, but in colour and left aligned. The arrangement text is also a double columned one , but the text is written on the left , in Times New Roman font and the footnotes, written in Arial smaller font, occupy the right column. It also differs from the BMJ articles in the subheadings´ tittles. The NEJM article is subdivided into : Background, Methods, Results and Conclusions. The Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussions (IMRAD) formula may be more clearly distinguished in this article than in the BMJs´.
Full sentences have been used in all the subsections . The Background and Methods sections are made up of two sentences each. The Results section comprises the longest section running along sentences. The shortest one is the Conclusions section which has only one sentence. The Results section outstands as the longest portion, full of numerals which might make it difficult for someone not related to the field to understand the core information. It might not be the case for someone acquainted to the medical field.
The BMJ and NEJM articles alternate in the use of passive and active voices. In the NEJM article, the verb “to be” has a high frequency of usage , especially in the past tense and in the Results section.There is also tense mobility with a sequence of Present (Present Perfect tense) Past and Present (Simple Present tense) times. The present perfect tense has been used in the Background section, the simple past tense in the Methods and Results section and, the simple present tense in the Conclusions section.
All in all, it may be claimed that although the format of abstracts in the medicine field presents variations depending on the journals´ requirements because they may prefer to publish their research according to different patterns, there are similar linguistic features that all of them share regarding the use of full sentences, past tenses, active and passive voices, numbers and abbreviations. Writing an efficient abstract may represent hard work but the effort will find its reward when members of the discourse community are enticed to read one´s publications.
References
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Jorgensen, K., Zahl, P-H., & Gotzsche, P. (2010) Breast Cancer mortality in organised mammography screening in Denmark: comparative study. BMJ 2010 340(1241), 1- 6 . doi:10-1136/bmj.c1241
Martinez, C., Assimes, T., Mines, D., Dell´aniello, S., & Suissa, S. (2010) Use of venlafaxine compared with other antidepressants and the risk of sudden cardiac death or near death: a nested case-control study. BMJ 2010 340(249), 1- 9. doi:10.1136/bmj.c249
Pintos, V., & Crimi, Y. (2010). LENGUA INGLESA ESPECIALIZADA II. Unit 4. Research Articles: Abstracts. UNIVERSIDAD CAECE.
Swales, J. (1990) Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Wijeysundera,D.N., Beattie, W.S., Elliot, R.F., Austin, P.C., Hux, J.E., & Laupacis, A. (2010). Non – invasive cardiac stress testing before elective major non –cardiac surgery: Population based cohort study. BMJ 2010, 340(b5526) 1 - 9. doi:10.1136/bmj.b5526
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