Investigating variation in medical poster abstracts

The proliferation of new specialised medical journals seems to substantiate the fact that findings from contemporary scientific research need to be circulated as quickly as possible. A convenient way to do that is to present medical ideas, projects and research in the form of congress posters, whose abstract, if published in major medical journals, can further medical careers. It is therefore the aim of this paper to investigate in what ways medical poster abstracts have developed linguistically across time. The results suggest that medical care seems to have acquired a more corporate identity, which, while affecting scientific investigation, can result in the elaboration of new types of medical discourse. This is reflected not only by the International Campaign to Revitalize Academic Medicine (ICRAM) manifesto, where attention is focused on a new form of discourse in which New Public Management thinking is evident, but also by medical poster abstracts, which, while maintaining generic IMRD integrity, show the presence of lexico-grammar features typical of corporate discourse, as confirmed by the attention to the financial aspects of medical care and research in medical discourse.