BACKGROUND The electronic version of the British Medical Journal (eBMJ) has a unique feature in that it provides an electronic record of the number of times an article has been viewed ("hits") in the week after its publication. We sought to compare the relative popularity of primary research and "evidence-based" papers against that of narrative reviews and editorials. We surveyed four broad gro...

Many argumentative texts, and news editorials in particular, follow a specific strategy to persuade their readers of some opinion or attitude. This includes decisions such as when to tell an anecdote or where to support an assumption with statistics, which is reflected by the composition of different types of argumentative discourse units in a text. While several argument mining corpora have re...

Editorials represent opinion articles written by the publisher, editors or columnists of newspapers. From this perspective, editorials are ideal sources for outlining views on events and analyzing how they are perceived, e.g. whether they are positive or negative or the kind of feelings or analysis they involve (uncertainty, worries, etc.). The proposed work aims at identifying the linguistic c...

In this study, Van Dijk’s (1998) model of CDA was utilized in order to examine the representation of Iran’s nuclear program in editorials published by British news casting companies. The analysis of the editorials was carried out at two levels of headlines and full text stories with regard to the linguistic features of lexical choices, nominalization, passivization, overcompleteness, and voice....

As if we needed it, the Journal brings another reminder of the caution with which the results of a single epidemiologic study, or even a handful of them, should be regarded. Hard on the heels of the largest epidemiologic study, until now, showing a positive relationship between breast cancer risk and serum levels of DDE (the major metabolite of DDT), and published last year in the Journal (7), ...

In this issue of Thorax there are two articles which add to the observations on an inverse link between mycobacterial exposure and atopic disorder, and to the larger story that certain microbial exposures in early childhood may play a key part in limiting immune dysregulation. Von Mutius and colleagues report increasing tuberculosis notification rates associated with a stepwise decrease in symp...

Decades of hypothesis-driven research have led to the discovery of oncogenes and tumor suppressors that affect carcinogenesis. With the advent of powerful genomic and proteomic microarray techniques, a different scientific paradigm is emerging—one in which hypotheses are generated based on the evaluation of global gene expression in cells or tissues. Tissue microarrays are also useful to interr...

BACKGROUND Coverage of health in Nepali print media is quite a recent phenomenon despite readers' ample appetite for it. Dominated by politics, Nepal's print media has been marginally publishing news pieces, features, editorials and op-ed articles, photographs and cartoons on health, though marginally. But the media did not wake up to the issues of human resources for health until lately. MET...