A Coh-Metrix Analysis of Variation among Biomedical Abstracts

Using the already validated Coh-Metrix tool, this study examines whether there are significant linguistic and discourse differences between biomedical abstracts for American and Korean English. Also, the current study accounts for variation among journals’ countries of origin, distinguishing between biomedical journals published in the United States from biomedical journals published in South Korea. The significance of these studies regards the growing number of second language (L2) biomedical researchers attempting to publish their research in national and international English-language journals, but who find themselves locked out of the discussion because of differences in linguistic and discourse conventions. The present study aims to provide a more thorough and quantitative understanding of the prototypical linguistic components in biomedical rhetoric, and to suggest how word-, sentence-, and discourse-level structures can be researched, taught, and developed into materials. This improved understanding is expected to provide a powerful apparatus for the promotion of L2 English writers in the biomedical field.