Hedging, Stance and Voice in Medical Research Articles

Abstract

As a scientist employed by an industry, you would have a vested interest in the sale of its products. You might hope that consumers would benefit, but profit would be uppermost on your mind. If you were a researcher at a medical center, you might hope to profit from what you discovered: to take out a patent on a medical device or a mutant bacterium. Nevertheless, you would need to impress on your fellow researchers that uppermost on your mind was not profit, but the advance of knowledge. To communicate this mandatory attitude toward your work — this stance — your prose would adopt a characteristic voice, a particular pattern of syntactic and lexical semantic choices. For example, Everett et al. (2010) present positive findings for rosuvastatin, a drug designed to lower cholesterol but tested to prevent stroke in their JUPITER trial. These authors' claims, however, are mitigated by a serious limitation — a meta-analysis showed that their findings in favor of rosuvastatin for stroke prevention did not differ significantly from the use of other statins. Given these results, these authors exhibit the tentativeness of their findings while maintaining face with statements such as (1):(1)Given the net benefit of statin therapy observed in our updated meta-analysis, it is possible that any apparent differences between JUPITER and each of the prior trials may simply reflect the play of chance.