The socio-pragmatic phenomenon of academic conflict (AC) is here addressed from a cross-cultural and diachronic perspective, and is examined by combining a quantitative approach and a qualitative discoursal analysis of its salient rhetorical features in a corpus of Spanish, French and English medical articles published between 1930 and 1995. The speech acts that conveyed AC were recorded in each paper and classified into 2 categories according to their level of commitment (direct author's involvement) or detachment (hedginess and AC responsibility shifting). The quantitative results were analyzed by means of the Chi-square test. Our overall findings indicate that French and Spanish scientists tend to be not only more critical, but also more authoritarian and passionate in the formulation of their AC than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. However, when analyzed diachronically, our results indicate that from the 1990s on, the rhetorical behavior of

Venezuela, Spain and the United States of America. We thus randomly selected 150 research papers from leading medical journals in each country. The frequency and length of ACKs, the number of named and unnamed acknowledgees, the reasons why they were acknowledged, the number of grants received and the sources of funding were recorded.The motivations that underpinned each ACK were classified according to Cronin's (1995) and Giles and Councill's (2004) typology. Results were analyzed by means of Chi-square tests. Our results show that ACKs from the English-language corpus are significantly more frequent and longer than those from both the Spanish and Venezuelan 2 samples. The number of persons acknowledged and of grants received was also significantly greater in the US sample than in the two Spanish-language corpora.Differences were found in the number and types of funding sources. Moreover, in the three corpora technical/instrumental assistance was more frequently acknowledged than peers' ideational input. A small-scale ethnographic research was conducted with Spanish and Venezuelan researchers in order to get first-hand feedback on the motivations that could lie behind their ACK behavior. We conclude that "backstage solidarity" (Goffman 1959, cited in Cronin and Franks 2006) significantly differs from one context to another and that the communicative and socio-cultural conventions of academic contributorship are not only discipline-dependent but also language-and context-dependent.

This paper is a diachronic analysis of a corpus of 180 titles drawn from Case Reports (CRs) published in the BMJ and BMJ Case Reports between 1840 and 2009. The corpus was divided into three blocks, and the frequency of occurrence of 69 text-internal variables was recorded in each title. Between-block comparisons were carried out, and Student's t-tests IntroductionSince before Hippocrates, case reports (CRs) have made, and still make, a valuable contribution to the advancement of medical science (Friedell 1973; Morgan 1985;Pascal 1985;Simpson and Griggs 1985;Morris 1989). McCarthy and Reilly (2000) report, for example, that a search of the MEDLINE database from 1996 to 2000, using the Medical Subject Heading term 'case report' , retrieved more than 140,000 citations. More recently a search of Web of Science using the same MSH term retrieved 160 articles from 1953 and 4,011 from (cited in Gawrylewski 2007. Communication & MedicineGiven the unpredictable nature of medicine, many medical professionals will indeed have come across a patient who has not been a textbook case. The patient may have presented in an unusual way, had a strange pathology, or reacted to a medical intervention in a manner that has not been seen before. The publication of such novelties and curiosities as CRs has for many centuries been a fundamental way of sharing knowledge and conveying medical experience, and throughout history there have been famous CRs that have helped shape the way we view health and disease (Jamjoom et al. 2009;Salager-Meyer 2012).In recent years, though, and especially since the 1990s (Maisonneuve et al. 2010), CRs have come under scrutiny and disfavor among some members of the medical scientific community, and they are now frequently relegated to the lowest rank in the hierarchy of study design. Indeed, there are those who argue, for example, that CRs are 'passé, trivial ' (Rose and Corn 1984), and that they are increasingly irrelevant in current medical practice and education (Yadav 2006) because their obscurity and rarity appeal only to a specialized few, and because they add little to everyday medical practice. What is more, so argue the 'opponents' of CR publishing, their anecdotal nature lacks the scientific rigor of large, wellconducted studies. CRs have therefore fallen down the hierarchical ladder of medical evidence, and many 64 Françoise Salager-Meyer et al. medical journals, for 'shortage of page space' , now refuse to publish CRs (for a thorough analysis of the growing obsolescence of the psychiatric case report as a knowledge-bearing text, see Berkenkotter 2008).Another reason why this 'endangered species' (Rose and Corn 1984) sometimes receives low esteem and 'is frequently dismissed -unfairly so -as unscientific' (Simpson and Griggs 1985: 403) is because CRs are considered to be non-citable items (Morris 1989), thus lowering the impact factor of journals where citation data rule decisions ( Van der Wall and Wilde 2009; Maisonnneuve et al. 2010). Indeed, Patsopoulos et al. (2005) found that ...

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The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to identify the evaluative speech acts, either positive or negative, contained in a corpus of 30 English-written medical book reviews published in <em>The British Medical Journal</em> in the period 2000-2009; 2) to analyze the linguistic-rhetorical strategies used to convey this evaluation. Our main results illustrate that various mitigating strategies are used not only to soften criticism, but also to help maintain social harmony and solidarity with the reviewees. Moreover, negative evaluation is on many occasions voiced at aspects outside the book reviewed, which would mean that apart from showing their expertise in the field tackled, book reviewers also want to discuss certain issues of their concern and to put forward their cultural background.