Phraseological patterns in a large corpus of biomedical articles

The objective of this study is to identify salient phraseological patterns in a large biomedical corpus composed of 375 original articles from four leading journals and to describe the way biomedical researchers fine-tune phraseology to each IMRAD section (i.e. Introductions, Methods, Results, and Discussions) and to each rhetorical step in a given article. The corpus was broken down into four sub-corpora corresponding to the archetypal IMRAD structure in order to identify significant differences in the distribution of key lexis and key word clusters across sections. The findings suggest that the style used by authors of original biomedical research articles is based on a limited repertoire of key standardized phraseological patterns specific to certain rhetorical steps. Keywords: medical writing; medical phraseology; phraseological patterns; medical word list