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Since its emergence in the 1960s, ESP has become a key aspect of language teaching and research. This paper traces the last 30 years of this journey to show its emergence from the periphery of applied linguistics to a serious force on the world stage. To do this we use bibliometric techniques to track changes in ESP research through an analysis of all 3,500 papers on the Social Science Citation Index since 1990 dealing with ESP topics. We identify which topics have been most prevalent and which authors, publications, journals and countries most influential over time. The results indicate that classroom practices remain central to the discipline and that there has been a consistent interest in specialised texts, particularly written texts, and in higher education and business English, with a massive increase in attention devoted to identity and academic and workplace discourses. The global interest in these questions is shown by the range of authors, diversity of geographical sources and the uptake of papers in a range of fields. We believe our findings may interest both ESP professionals in identifying crucial publishing areas and academics fascinated by the emergence of a new discipline.

Background We present a single institution registry with the novel feature of 90-day outcome assessments on all hospitalized acute stroke patients, inclusive of every patient with a primary discharge diagnosis of transient ischemic attack (TIA), acute ischemic stroke (AIS), nontraumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), and intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). Methods Patient data obtained in the HOPES registry include demographics, comorbid diagnoses, medications, health behaviors, laboratory values, imaging studies, vital signs, and outcome measures, most notably the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at 90days. Results From May 2016 to December 31, 2017, 1607 patients were enrolled in the HOPES registry. 90-day outcome assessments were captured on 1555 patients (97%): 1096 AIS, 230 ICH, 110 SAH, and 119 TIA patients. Mortality rates and 90-day outcomes were most favorable for TIA patients. Mortality and 90-day disability scores were poorest for patients in the ICH group. Conclusions The inclusion of 90-day outcomes data will allow HOPES to stand apart among stroke registries as a new standard for stroke outcomes research. The registry will provide the necessary comprehensive data that the field needs as we transition our focus of stroke research to poststroke recovery.

Figure legends, a descriptive statement accompanying a graph, is an essential component of science writing, and novice writers often find it difficult to write an adequate and plausible one. However, almost no discourse analysis has been done of this short yet important part of research articles. Taking a corpus-driven approach, this study explores the use of keywords and lexical bundles in figure legends in order to understand how the discourse is constructed by the salient recurrent single and multiple lexical items. Results show that in figure legends writers are most concerned with the textual descriptions of blue and red as markers of contrasting scientific items and bars and images as representative of graphic shapes. Additionally, writers also frequently use shown and indicated to introduce the demonstrative relationship between graphic elements and scientific information. Further, noun/prepositional bundles account for the overwhelming proportion, followed by verb-related and then clause-related forms, while research-oriented functions of bundles are more frequently used than text and participant-oriented functions. The results offer useful pedagogical input and help novice and L2 writers come to grips with this part-genre.

This study explores the longitudinal development of L2 academic ‘stance’ features resulting from instruction in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at a university in Hong Kong. We analysed the frequency and wordings of hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mention within a 205,682 word longitudinal corpus of essays and reports collected over a semester's instruction via pre-, mid- and post-instruction submissions, alongside data on submission grade. Data was analysed for frequency and wording differences alongside mixed-effect models to confirm the impact of instruction on the data. Results show significant longitudinal variation in the frequency of hedging, boosting, marking attitude and self-mention devices as the result of instruction, with a rise in the use of hedging and an overall reduction in the use of boosting and self-mention, serving to leave students with a more careful, narrower, less polarising and less personal range of expressions with which to convey their stance over time. We also present longitudinal genre-specific effects on stance features between essays and reports, and show how a longitudinal increase in hedges and boosters results in texts that receive a higher grade from teacher-raters. Our findings recommend explicit instruction of stance features as crucial in raising students' awareness of how to achieve persuasive academic writing.

Medical students often lack key skills in academic writing, yet good academic writing is often a pre-requisite for employment, promotion and enculturation into the profession. This article focuses on the rhetorical strategies used for the presentation of academic stance by student writers of dentistry research reports. Adopting a contrastive, corpus-based approach, we compare student writing with that of comparable professionally-written research reports for evidence of hedging, boosting, self-mention and attitude markers. Our findings indicate that professional reports exhibit a narrower set of linguistic devices than used by student writers, who tend to use a much wider range of the four stance feature types analysed for discussion of both others' and their own personal stance, both across whole texts and by section. We discuss pedagogical implications for ESP professionals working to more closely align student writing with that of professional norms.

Research article abstracts have become an important genre in all knowledge fields, playing a crucial role in persuading readers, and reviewers, to take the time to go further into the paper itself. This promotional aspect of abstracts is well known, but less discussed is the ways writers are able to skilfully foreground their claim, package the information in a cohesive and coherent manner, and craft a disciplinary stance. One such rhetorical strategy is what we are calling metadiscursive nouns. Nouns such as fact, analysis, and belief are common in abstracts and do a great deal of rhetorical work for writers. In this paper we explore the interactive and interactional functions they perform in the rhetorical moves of 240 research abstracts from six disciplines. The results show how these nouns are frequently used to frame and coherently manage arguments while, at the same time, helping writers to claim disciplinary legitimacy and promote the value and relevance of their research to their discipline.

Research on third-party moral judgments highlights two mechanisms as central to moral judgments of accidental harms: the inference of intent and the perception of harm. However, little is known about how these mechanisms are recruited when people evaluate themselves for harm that they have accidentally caused. Here we explore how a person's perspective — as either actor or observer — influences their moral judgments of accidental harm. We use fMRI to investigate how brain regions involved in the inference of intent and the perception of harm differentially respond when participants either cause (first-person) or observe (third-person) accidental harm. First, we find that people judge their own accidental harms more harshly than they judge others' accidents, and hold themselves more responsible for the unintended harmful outcomes of their choices. Second, we find that regions responding to the first-hand experience of pain are also more sensitive to first-person harms relative to third-person harms, and brain-behavior relationships in a subset of these regions suggest that the tendency to judge oneself more harshly may be supported by a greater sensitivity to the victim's experience of harm. Third, though we find that first-person harms recruit regions for mental state inference to a lesser extent than third-person harms, this difference does not appear to account for the behavioral differences in moral judgment between first-person and third-person harms. The results of this experiment suggest that accidental harms are an important context for broadening our understanding of the relationship between agency, empathy, and moral judgments about the self.

3MT presentations have emerged as an important academic genre, helping graduate students to present disciplinary knowledge to wide audiences. While previous research has investigated the structuring of presentations, little is known about the rhetorical features students employ to persuade their diverse listenership. In this study, we draw on Hyland’s (2005) stance and engagement framework to explore how the popularisation of scientific knowledge has influenced the ways presenters interact with their audiences. Based on a 3MT corpus of 80 presentations from six disciplines, the results show that stance markers are more often used than listener engagement markers, while explicit mentions of self and listeners are the most common features. Additionally, presenters in the hard sciences, compared to those in soft-knowledge fields, make more use of the interactional features, but rhetorical questions are more frequently used in the soft knowledge fields. Therefore, we see this nuanced use of stance and engagement as related to the rhetorical contexts of register, genre and disciplinary propositional content. Pedagogical implications raised include developing students’ ability in the popularisation of science and their raising their awareness of disciplinary knowledge and its social relevance.

Informality has become something of a contemporary mantra as, from the denim-clad offices of internet startups to the pages of business reports, we are encouraged to shed old constraints and relax conventions. This paper explores the perception that since informality has now invaded a large range of written and spoken domains of discourse, academic writing has also followed this trend. It asks the question whether academics are now freer to construct less rigidly objective texts and craft a more inclusive relationship with their readers. Taking a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines at three periods over the past years, we explore changes in the use of ten key features regarded by applied linguists and style guide authors as representing informality. Our results show only a small increase in the use of these features, and that this is mainly accounted for by increases in the hard sciences rather than the social sciences. It is also largely restricted to increases in first person pronouns, unattended reference and sentences beginning with conjunctions. We discuss these results and argue they represent changes in rhetorical conventions which accommodate more obvious interpersonal interactions in the sciences.

Engagement is the way that writers explicitly acknowledge the presence of their readers in a text, drawing them in through readermention, personal asides, appeals to shared knowledge, questions and directives. This is a key rhetorical feature of academic writing and has been a topic of interest to applied linguists for over 20 years. Despite this interest, however, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred across different disciplines. Are academic texts becoming more interactional and if so in what ways and in what fields? Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we look for answers to these questions to determine whether reader engagement has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Our paper presents, and attempts to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit engagement during this period.

Purpose To evaluate whether morphologic characteristics of rotator cuff tear have prognostic value in determining symptomatic structural failure of arthroscopic rotator cuff repair independent of age or gender. Methods Arthroscopic rotator cuff repair cases performed by five fellowship-trained surgeons at our institution from 2006 to 2013 were retrospectively reviewed. Data extraction included demographics, comorbidities, repair technique, clinical examination, and radiographic findings. Failure in symptomatic patients was defined as structural defect on postoperative magnetic resonance imaging or pseudoparalysis on examination. Failures were age and gender matched with successful repairs in a 1:2 ratio. Results A total of 30 failures and 60 controls were identified. Supraspinatus atrophy ( P = .03) and tear size (18.3 mm failures v 13.9 mm controls; P = .02) were significant risk factors for failure, as was the presence of an infraspinatus tear greater than 10 mm (62% v 17%, P P = .06) and simple suture configuration ( P = .17) were more common but similar between groups. Diabetes mellitus and active tobacco use were not significantly associated with increased failure risk but psychiatric medication use was more frequent in the failure group. Conclusions This study confirms previous suspicions that tear size and fatty infiltration are associated with failure of arthroscopic rotator cuff repair but independent of age or gender in symptomatic patients. There is also a quantitative cutoff on magnetic resonance imaging for the size of infraspinatus involvement that can be used clinically as a predicting factor. Although reported in the literature, smoking and diabetes were not associated with failure. Level of Evidence Level III, retrospective case control.

This paper uses a bibliometric analysis to track changes in EAP research over the last 40 years. Based on a corpus of 12,600 EAP-related articles from 40 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals, we reveal what research topics have been most popular over time and which authors, publications and source countries have been most influential. The results show that while topics concerning teaching, learning and classroom practices, have remained popular, those with a focus on contexts and discourses have grown since 2001, with substantial attention devoted to identity, interaction and genre. The most cited authors and publications also show a marked shift towards an interest in academic writing, language description and perspectives underpinning social relationships in learning and communication. Finally, our study shows that EAP is achieving a global reach as authors affiliated with emerging centres of research, particularly China, begin to make a mark on the field. We believe these findings may be of interest to EAP professionals seeking to become more familiar with the field and as a way of mapping the emergence of EAP as a maturing discipline.

Peer review is regarded as a central pillar of academic publishing, acting as a filter for readers, guidance for authors and a screening process for editors. Despite this, however, it is a contentious and high stakes practice which is not always conducted in a mentoring or collegial spirit. The pressures on academics to publish in high impact journals means this can be a fraught experience Many academics find it an anxious and upsetting experience, and this is particularly true when reviews are overly critical or abusive. In this paper we explore extracts of reviews which authors regard as particularly harsh. Examining a corpus of 850 excerpts posted by authors on the shitmyreviewerssay website, we identify the keywords, evaluative foci and stance markers which distinguish these reviews, and which contribute to their cutting effects. In doing so we not only seek to describe these texts, but to contribute to a wider conversation concerning the feedback academics receive on their work and encourage more mentoring and formative practices.

The study of stance and how academic writers convey an attitude to their material and readers has become an important area of teaching research in EAP in recent years (Hyland & Guinda, 2012). A relatively neglected means of stance expression, however, has been the Noun Complement structure. This study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction which is associated with students' advanced academic literacy. Through a corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis, this study compares the use of this stance construction in argumentative essays of 366 Chinese university students (L2) with those of 82 American students (L1) of similar age and educational level. Results show that the L2 students use significantly fewer instances of this construction especially in the event, discourse and cognition types of stance nouns, which are bound up with the generic conventions of argumentative essays. But they show a propensity to invest personal affect by pre-modifying the stance nouns with attitudinal adjectives and first-person possessives. The paper discusses a number of issues raised by the research and makes pedagogical suggestions for EAP writing instruction.

The new millennium brought renewed attention to improving the health of women and children. In this same period, direct deaths from conflicts have declined worldwide, but civilian deaths associated with conflicts have increased. Nigeria is among the most conflict-prone countries in sub-Saharan Africa, especially recently with the Boko Haram insurgency in the north. This paper uses two data sources, the 2013 Demographic and Health Survey for Nigeria and the Social Conflict Analysis Database, linked by geocode, to study the effect of these conflicts on child health. We show a strong association between living close to a conflict zone and acute malnutrition in Nigerian children in 2013. This is related to the severity of the conflict, measured both in terms of the number of conflict deaths and the length of time the child was exposed to conflict. The association with mortality is much less clear, with essentially no significant relationship to conflict detected using these data for the period studied. Undoubtedly civil conflict is limiting the future prospects of Nigerian children and the country’s economic growth. In Nigeria conflicts in the north are expected to continue with sporadic attacks and continued damaged infrastructure. Thus, the children in Nigeria will continue to suffer the consequences documented in this study.

Heart failure (HF) patients have a poor prognosis, yet outcomes might be improved by early identification of risk. We investigated the prognostic value of B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) in patients at risk for HF (American College of Cardiology [ACC]/American Heart Association [AHA] HF Stages A and B), and compared prognosis with Stage C/D patients.Outpatients referred for echocardiogram (n=829) were stratified by ACC/AHA HF stage and BNP levels (cutpoint of 100pg/mL). Primary outcome was death or cardiac hospitalization at 1 year. BNP levels increased with increasing numbers of cardiovascular risk factors and with HF stage. Stage A/B patients with high BNP had a similar or worse prognosis than Stage C/D patients with low BNP. In fact, the prognosis of Stage C/D patients with low BNP did not significantly differ from the prognosis of Stage A/B patients with low BNP (adjusted HR 1.21, 95% CI 0.62-2.37), whereas Stage A/B patients with high BNP did have a significantly worse prognosis (adjusted HR 1.91, 95% CI 1.11-3.28).Individuals without any history of HF but with BNPor=100pg/mL are at equal or higher risk than those with a HF history whose BNP is100pg/mL. BNP may be useful to identify asymptomatic individuals at high risk for future cardiovascular events.