Consistent naming in scientific writing: sound advice or shibboleth?

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.