Introduction Of Medical Research

Medical research is one of the highly technical forms of presentations and is, in fact, written in a standard format. Most experimental research reports are of this type. Such formats actually divide the paper into “Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion” – the traditional IMRD sections of a research paper.

All authors who write research papers are familiar with the general outline of the IMRD, however they are not aware that each section of the content of any research paper has a substructure. This was what was missing from the viewpoint of most authors and especially newcomers to the discourse community of academia, which would partly explain their frequent troubles in producing clean, coherent and logically structured research reports.

Studies have been conducted to prove that medical doctors have a tough job writing laboratory research reports. Adams-Smith says that over the years, doctors have been defined as having a bad practice in writing. According to McPhail, this can be traced back to 1911. He observed such examples of poor writing on the part of medical doctors who chose some of the worst words for the excessive use of jargon, inconsistent and unclear expression of ideas, and the use of a effusive and even pompous style. Most clinical trials conducted by physicians today are either uncontrolled or poorly controlled. That is to say, they are poorly organized or structured. Hibbard and Meadows also pointed out that information, such as dosage and duration of treatment, and other similar information, which often appears in leading medical journals, is often omitted from the abstract when the article is summarized. Until now the largest part of the research on the characteristics of written medical discourse was carried out with almost complete neglect of the syntactic features of the text (see Pettinari 1982; DuBois 1981; Malcolm 1987; Salager 1986; Adams-Smith 1983). In itself, almost no attempt has been made to closely examine the structure of the information contained in medical research reports (for example, Bruce 1983; Adams-Smith 1984, 1987; Gosden 1992, 1993; Skelton, 1994).

The aim of this paper is to establish the schematic structure of information in a medical research paper using the genre approach developed by Swales, 1981, 1990.

Consequently, it is a straightforward extension of Swales' model of article introductions - presented by Swales - also to the main body of scientific research articles. Except perhaps for Skelton (1994) who investigated the structure of primary research articles and Gosden (1992, 1993) who considered the discourse functions of the topic in a scientific research article, much genre-focused work has concentrated on article autonomous sections. For example, Swales (1981), Cooper (1985), Hopkins (1985) and Crookes (1986) focus on the introduction to the article, while Belanger (1982), Peng (1987), and Hopkins and Dudley-Evans (1988) focus on the discussion section. A comparison can be made between this study and the study reported by Skelton (1994), both studies describing the structure of information in medical research papers, and both using a genre-analysis approach to their description.

However, while they have many similarities, based on the actual content, their approach and descriptions essentially differ in their orientation and therefore scope. Skelton's paper is a popular paper, designed for a general reader--general medical practitioners. This alone limits the scope of the linguistic analysis that underlies the observations and conclusions made in the main body of the text. This essay is much more suitable for the interest of readers familiar with linguistics. Therefore, it uses more refined and regulated linguistic properties in describing the moves than Skelton. In particular, Skelton did not show the sub-moves in his report including the one performed in this research. In other words, while most of the articles in the research were a wholesale attempt to explain the structure of such articles, none have gone as deep as the present study in that it explicitly attempts to describe the structure of such articles by describing their linguistic makeup.