A Dynamic Classification of Medical Genres

In the past few years, some research has been devoted to genre in scientific and medical literature. Genre studies have involved mainly the analysis of articles and books. In particular, the basic structure of medical articles has been described as consisting in various sections including Abstract, Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Discussion, References. Some authors have included also sections like Acknowledgments, Key Words, and Address for Correspondence. This chapter provides a ‘dynamic classification’ of the medical papers published in international scientific literature and particularly in two important journals in the field of medicine: The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. The two Journals fundamentally overlap in terms of research papers instead many differences were found in terms of non-research papers.