Fast-Track Publications: The Genre of Medical Research letters

This chapter investigates the use of research letters in medical publications and illustrates that their scope and purpose are different in the medical field when compared with other scientific domains: while Hyland’s letters allowed the reporting of new results and ideas to a wider community than specialists and are a means of promoting young scientists, the authors of medical research letters range from young scientists to established scholars. As regards the structure of this genre, the analysis shows that it follows the IMRD sequence. However, since the text is shorter than in research articles, there are features which make the research letter slightly different and oblige the author to be more direct. To better persuade readers, the author adopts such rhetorical strategies as the present tense (to achieve a high degree of epistemic modality when scientific certainty is less likely to be counterclaimed) and lexical hedges such as suggest and indicate (whose subject refers to data rather than to the author). In so doing, the author limits her/his responsibility for the truth value of what is being expressed.