Collegiality, critique and the construction of scientific argumentation in medical book reviews: A diachronic approach

This paper examines the evolution of criticisms (CRs) and their targets in a corpus of 100 French-written book reviews (BRs), 50 published between 1890 and 1900 (Block A) and 50 between 1990 and 2000 (Block B). Critical and uncritical BRs were identified. The number of CRs, their level of specificity and hedginess and their targets were recorded in each critical BR. The targets identified were classified as either contextual, conceptual or textual. Within- and between-Block comparisons were performed using chi-square tests. Results show that critical BRs are more frequent in Block A than in Block B, although the difference is not statistically significant. They also show that hedged CRs outnumber unhedged ones in the whole corpus (p = .0001) and in each Block (p = .0001) and that unhedged CRs are more frequent in Block A than in Block B (p = .0034). Conceptual and contextual targets are the most frequent ones in the whole corpus. Contextual CRs in Block A outnumber those in Block B (p = .0001), whereas both conceptual and textual CRs are more frequent in Block B than in Block A (p = .0008 and p = .03). Our findings underline the increasing social function and cognitive complexity of today's scientific enterprise.