6533b835fe1ef96bd129fe63

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Letters to the editor: Still vigorous after all these years?

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Abstract This paper investigates Letters to the Editor, a section in biomedical journals used by scientists since the early 19th century to question already validated research. The aim of this study is to highlight some of the discursive strategies and to bring to the fore the linguistic characteristics of this particular genre, to analyze its goal, role and use within a community of French researchers. It is based on a corpus of 200 letters selected from two scientific journals in the fields of biology and medicine: The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and The Lancet published between 1999 and 2002. The strategy of questioning is analyzed as an explicit and implicit mode of criticism leveled at an established scientific fact. It is a truly original mode of expression within scientific discourse. We postulate that letters to the editor have a common cognitive pattern since our corpus shows that an underlying macrostructure built on four moves can be identified in most letters. This rhetorical mode is used to challenge previous research and can therefore be considered to be a dynamic process for research. These letters also display original linguistic features distinct from those used in the research article. We identified syntactic specificities among which are the very low occurrence of hedging and of the passive voice, resulting from the researcher-centered approach. The lexical analysis revealed a heavy use of disparaging terms which makes the style derogatory. Social and cultural references also typify this genre. The impact and representation of this mode of scientific expression in a French-speaking scientific community were measured through a questionnaire survey whose results are reported and analyzed.