Summarizing findings

This study shows how the interdisciplinary nature of scientific research, the tremendous growth in the number of journals and the easy access to information via online publications have influenced the way biomedical scientists tackle their professional reading and writing. Research articles online incorporate new presentational components - blurbs, authors’ summaries, synopses - sharing with traditional sections the need to attract the busy reader’s attention to the main results. Findings are anticipated in the title and reformulated in all article sections, using different linguistic structures to avoid semantic and syntactic repetitions. From interviews with scientists and the analysis of 20 articles from two prestigious journals, I conclude that this rephrasing phenomenon, which mainly affects open access publications, complicates RA writing for NNSs and may be announcing a new form of scientific information presented in well-defined cognitive textual modules.