Medicina convencional y alternativa: un estudio sociopragmático del paratexto de los «agradecimientos»

Abstract

We here report the findings of a content analysis of acknowledgments in 50 English-language medical research papers published in the period 2004-2005 in conventional and alternative medicine journals. Our results show a series of differences between the articles included in both types of biomedicine, related not only to the number of authors per article and their nationality, the number of acknowledgments, their type and length, but also to the number of funding sources and the kind of funds received to conduct the research. These differences would reveal that in the field of alternative medicine research tends to be less collaborative and interdependent than in the field of conventional medicine, thus underlining the recency of this type of research and, consequently, of its socio-technical and socio-cognitive networks.

This research was supported by Grant Nº CDCHTA-M-976-09-06 from the University of The Andes Research Center.