ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social, political, and economic influences medicine and medical research have on societies. It summarizes and discusses previous linguistic, multisemiotic, and social-anthropological research, exploring how these studies can be interpreted from a dialogic perspective and what they tell us about medicine as a scientific discipline. The chapter argues that the medical research article is the primary site for the contextualization of knowledge in this field, and presents and discusses official guidelines and previous research into the generic structure of medical research articles. The chapter concludes with a section that describes the selection, annotation, and analysis of a corpus of medical research articles that is the primary material for this study.
