HIV Discourse in the British Medical Journal, 1985-2005. The impact of digital literacy and Evidence-Based Medicine on syntactic patterns and variations in RA titles

Although titling is traditionally a lexically and textually prominent operation, performing key informative/persuasive/promotional functions in discourse domains such as advertising and entertainment, the spread of Web-based communication has increased its importance with respect to practices farther away on a discoursal spectrum from such functions as medical communication. The inception of the Internet as the main channel for knowledge dissemination has brought about significant changes in the titling of highly specialized discourse. Medical RA titles (RATs) seem, as a genre, to provide insights into the impact of digital literacy on scientific knowledge. In order to explore such changes, a total of 1250 RATs from the British Medical Journal – the world’s first online medical journal – were collected from a 20-year period, and analysed with AntConc and Wordsmith Tools. The RATs in the corpus trace the history of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus from 1985, when the first WHO conference on AIDS was held in the USA, until 2005. The paper analyses and contrasts print vs. digital RATs, identifying and quantifying the key syntactical/textual patterns and variations in a genre whose main function is to package/textualize scientific contents (including competing clinical methodologies), as well as to disseminate them across specialized and/or lay audiences. Research questions concern the extent to which the language of RATs has been changing with respect to the dissemination triggered by digital literacy, from crystallised and gate-keeping formulations to more articulated ones, placing distinctive emphasis on argumentative/persuasive/metadiscoursive functions, as well as the impact of Evidence-Based Medicine – today’s leading paradigm for scientific knowledge, first presented in BMJ in 1995 – on contemporary HIV discourse.