On Academic Conflict in Medical Research Articles

Objective:To investigate the distribution of academic conflicts, if any, in medical research articles. Methods:Twenty-seven and 25 medical research articles in the field of internal medicine were selected from English and Chinese respectable jour nals, respectively. Then, the speech acts that reflected a conflict between a scientist’s knowledge claim and another scientist’s knowledge claim were manually searched and recorded in each paper. Data were analyzed using non-parametric Chi-test. Results:There were 123 academic conflicts recorded in the English corpus and 49 Academic Conflicts in the Chinese corpus. Significant difference was observed in the overall frequency of academic conflicts between the English and Chinese medical discourse (p=0.001). Besides, as for the distribution within research articles, introduction and discussion sections were the sections where Academic Conflict speech acts were most likely to occur in both corpra. Conclusion:The Chinese scholars are less likely to criticize peers. Introduction and discussion sections were the sections where Academic Conflict speech acts were most likely to occur. Our results are in agreement with previous results and confirmed the claim that highly different cultures vary in their discourse preferences. Our findings are of pedagogical significance.