From Stigma to Statistics: A Study of US HIV Discourse in Digital Research Article Titles, 1986-2016

This chapter investigates Research Article Titles (RATs) disseminating knowledge on HIV produced in the US from 1986 to 2016. The study aims at shedding light on the linguistic and discursive history of HIV within the Evidence Based Medicine paradigm. Promoting statistical analysis and epidemiological surveillance as the sole tools for the diagnosis and management of individual and global pathologies, EBM has deeply affected the scope and purposes of HIV research. Within a discourse-analytical framework, the study analyses the key syntactical and textual coordinates in a corpus of 4,504 digital RATs, assembled via the Web of Science Citation Index-Expanded, with a view to investigating the ideological and communicative impact of such innovative methodology on specialized medical language. The key function played by the genre of RATs in legitimizing and promoting the ideology of advanced industrial society, thereby crucially influencing the research agendas of competing institutions in Europe and America, is also investigated in the study. For such reason, the discursive evolution of HIV research is reconstructed across competing specialties, representing different steps forward in the clinical history of this pathology, such as public/environmental health, biochemistry, molecular biology, immunology and infectious diseases.