Consistent naming in scientific writing: sound advice or shibboleth?

Abstract

Scientific style manuals typically stress that scientific texts should use consistent terminology: in other words, a given entity or process should consistently be denominated by the same lexeme. But to what extent do native-English-speaker scientific writers actually follow this advice? To investigate this question, I analyzed anaphoric references in a sample of biomedical research abstracts. My results indicate that (1) straight repetition is indeed a common anaphoric strategy; (2) proforms are used infrequently; (3) where straight repetition would be inappropriate because of Given/New structure or other considerations, writers typically make use of reductive head-repetition (e.g. erythrocytes referring back to murine erythrocytes) or determiner-plus-hypernym structures (e.g. these cells); and (4) packaging devices (notably packaging nominalizations as defined by Halliday) have anaphoric function, and occur very frequently. The anaphoric use of reductive head-repetition forms part of a much wider system of taxonomy construction and manipulation, based on nominal groups with “general nouns” (such as protein) as head. In general, and despite the occasional use of synonyms, these findings suggest that the conventional style-manual exhortation to use consistent terminology is sensible advice grounded in native-English-speaker practice. Applications of these findings in the second-language academic writing classroom are briefly discussed.