“Be concise but informative”. Discursive recommendations in Argentine scientific journals.

Abstract

This paper comes under the field of glottopolitics, interested in studying the way a variety of institutions or groups intervene in language (Arnoux 2012, Del Valle 2017). With the aim of observing how scientific writing in Argentina is regulated, it analyses guidelines for authors of the exact and natural sciences and their practical implementations concerning the research article genre. After an initial survey, a corpus of 130 journals (current and indexed) was conformed, about which recommendations on composition and title styles, abstracts and the textual body of the article were studied. It can be anticipated that suggestions on titles and abstracts respond mainly to bibliometric criteria related to the quick recovery of the articles on the database and they present a relative stability along the series. Alternatively, the recommendations on the text are uneven and refer to the diverse features of writing (grammar, lexis, enunciation). These differences do not respond just to the disparate disciplinar inscriptions but to a variety of representations of the articles’ reader’s profile; they focus as well on different resources to achieve the attributes that would characterize the genre style.