Estructura lingüística de títulos de casos clínicos odontológicos en español

Abstract

In the study of biomedical discourse genres, priority has been given to research papers in English, while other relevant genres, such as systematic reviews and case reports, have received less attention. Furthermore, there are a few discourse studies in Spanish focusing on the structure of titles that guide readers and authors and facilitate the indexing of these documents in databases. For this reason, the study aims to identify the lexical-grammatical structures and rhetorical functions of clinical case report titles in Spanish and to compare them with previous research that analyze the same variables in related dentistry genres in English and Spanish. To carry out this investigation, we collected and analyzed 248 titles of case reports published in Spanish in specialized journals, with methods of discourse analysis complemented with semi-structured interviews with specialist informants in the field. Results show an average 12.7 words per title; a high presence of compound titles of two (94%) and three components (4%), followed by nominal titles (2%); two main rhetorical combinations (1/disease or treatment and method, 2/topic, description or method); high presence of nominal constructions, modified by prepositional phrases (100%) and non-personal verbal phrases (10%); a majority of titles identifies the discourse genre (‘clinical case report’, ‘case report’) and includes both disciplinary and non-disciplinary nouns (‘maxillary myiasis’, ‘case report’). These results have pedagogical implications for teaching academic writing to dentistry students and in-training dentists, as empirical data and real examples reported may inform syllabus design and the teaching practice.