No abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the 'translation process' (Fleischman 2001) from the patient's story into the doctor's report in interactive case reports from professional medical journals. Interactive case reports are a relatively new development in the genre, which has been postulated by, and adopted in, several publication outlets. The novelty of the variety is the possibility for readers to comment on a published case as well as the optional Patient's perspective section, in which the patient can share their experience of illness and treatment. In the present paper, a collection of interactive case reports derived from professional medical journals will be examined. The material under study can be seen as a contact situation between the lay discourse of a patient's narration and the professional discourse of medical description. The comparison and qualitative analysis of the two discourses referring to the same disease event will point to different communicative accents, different means and different effects. Drawing on the tradition of Rhetorical Genre Studies, the paper will also emphasise the many social practices in which the variety is, and can be, used.

While titles in scientific journals in general have attracted considerable interest, titles in medical research seem not to have been examined quite extensively. In these few studies, attention has been paid primarily to the form and length of titles as well as to their content. What is also emphasised is the need for discussion and further research on the topic in order to establish consistent guidelines regarding the formulation of clear and precise titles, which would aid journal editors, authors and readers. This paper constitutes an attempt to examine practices of formulating titles in medical case reports in Polish, following the study of F. Salager-Meyer et al. (2013a), in which title length, structure and content were considered as well.

This article aims to present and discuss new developments in the macro-genre of medical case reporting. These developments are novel forms of case reports published in international medical journals, going beyond the mere reporting of a case of a new disease or of its novel aspects. They may consist in the differences at the level of form, function and mode of content presentation. The data for the study constitute various publications derived from prestigious medical publishing outlets in English and will be analysed from the qualitative discourse perspective. The article demonstrates both generic creativity on the part of the authors as well as reflections on the changes taking place in medical practice.

This article constitutes a study of the narrative included in the abstract section in case reports from a professional medical journal from otolaryngology. The rationale behind this analysis is that the abstract section is seen not only as the essence of a publication but also as a story in which sequences of events are presented. These events constitute part and parcel of a particular medical practice of case reporting, following thus specific ordering and modes of content presentation, i.e. of the patient, the disease and of the treatment process. This way they yield themselves to narrative analysis. The objective of the paper is to determine the narrative properties of their characteristic discourse.