Debate-Creating vs. Accounting References in French Medical Journals      

This article investigates the quantitative and qualitative evolution of debate-creating (DEB) vs. accounting (ACC) references in 90 French medical articles published between 1810 and 1995. My findings suggest that nineteenth-century French academic writing tends to be more polemical oroppositional than cooperative by contrast to its twentieth-century counterpart. These results suggest that the debate-creating vs. accounting opposition could be a rhetorical universal of referential behavior in medical literature.

Salager-Meyer, Francoise. Technical Communication Quarterly (2000). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical