Metatextual Evaluation in Journal Editorials

The shift to English as lingua franca of academic communication, combined with journal digitalisation and online distribution, is making available to global audiences an unprecedented amount of cutting-edge scientific literature. A well-known provider of electronic bibliographic resources claims coverage of no less than 22,000 scholarly journals in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities (ISI 2006). The development is a mixed blessing for academic communities, as it offers new opportunities for the publication and exchange of findings across national-linguistic barriers, while on the other hand it complicates the selection of relevant material by readers, referees and academic gatekeepers in general (cf. Morris 1998; Swales 2004). This challenge is addressed increasingly through journal editorials, whose linguistic construction deserves closer investigation in the soft as well as the hard sciences. Though more firmly established in medical journals (cf. Atkinson 1992; Gross & Stärke-Meyerring 1999; Salager-Meyer 2001; Redelmeier & Shumak 2003; Vázquez y del Árbol 2005), the genre is slowly gaining importance also in softer fields. Drawing on 40 recent texts from journals in medicine and applied linguistics, the present paper describes how editorials in two unrelated disciplines are used to frame and/or foreground new knowledge claims. Close attention is given to metatextual evaluation, which targets the scientific and practical worth of new publications (Hunston & Thompson 2000; Gunnarsson 2001). The widening knowledge gap between specialisations, and also between researchers and practitioners, underpins the genre’s evaluative-popularising orientation, whose linguistic realisations are discussed in the light of recent studies on academic genres in disciplinary settings (Hyland 2000; Breivega et al. 2002; Bhatia 2004).