| المستخلص: |
Medical research and publications are the back-bone for advancing the medical field of any country. However, few studies have investigated Libyan medical writing. These studies have tended to focus on assessing the contribution of Libya to medical research rather on the rhetorical or linguistic patterns of Libyan scholars‟ medical writing. For example, a study was conducted by Bakoush et al. (2007), who assessed the contribution of Libya to medical research by examining its contribution to the PubMed database (PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 19 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to 1948). All publications affiliated with Libya in the PubMed database were counted over a five year period ending December 2006. They also used the same method to obtain data on the PubMed medical publications from Tunisia, Morocco and Yemen. The results of their study show the low production rate of scientific medical papers from Libya in international peer reviewed journals as compared to countries such as Tunisia. Tunisia had the largest number of PubMed publications among the studied countries: 20.4 publications per million population per year. Libya had much fewer publications: 2.4 publications per million population per year. They concluded that the biomedical research publications in Libya are scanty and declining. The absence of a research culture among native Libyan medical professionals is one of the reasons for the decline. Bakoush et al. (2007) point out that the educational system in Libya does not emphasise medical research in undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Furthermore, universities do not stress the quality of research when deciding on academic promotion. This could be the same reason for the lack of research on generic structure and linguistic patterns of Libyan academic writing and medical writing. The study here undertaken aims to make a start on filling the existing gap by offering a contrastive analysis of Libyan and native speakers of English scholars writing in the field of medicine. The major aim of this study is to investigate the rhetorical variation between the research article (RA) abstract written in English by native speakers (NSs) for an international journal and in English for a local journal by Libyan authors in an attempt to understand how and why language choice might affect this genre in actual use. For such purpose one method of data collection was employed, involving move analysis. A total of 20 RA abstracts written in English were randomly selected: (i) 10 written in English by NSs of English, from an international journal in the field of medicine, and (ii) 10 others in English from a Libyan national journal by Libyan scholars also in the field of medicine. Findings indicate that two different rhetorical organisations of abstracts were found to be favoured in each sub-corpus: whereas English NSs RA abstracts tended to follow the canonical P-M-Pr-C (Purpose-Method-Product-Conclusion) structure. In contrast, Libyan abstracts tended to include all the moves which characterise the patterning I-P-M-Pr-C (Introduction-Purpose-Method-Product-Conclusion). It is here argued that an explanation for these divergences should be sought in relationship to various factors. These factors are the impact of editorial guidelines of abstracts of each journal; discourse community size; publishing pressure, and the background knowledge of the members of the discourse community. The implications of this study are discussed in the Conclusion section.
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