Developing a new academic wordlist for medical purposes – a viable tool for educators

Abstract

Objective: This study aims at developing a list of academic and technical words commonly used in medical research articles. It is conducted in line with the specificity of academic literacy and vocabulary practices in every individual discipline.Methods: The corpus of this study consisted of 18,462,820 words extracted from 1,784 research articles accessed from three prestigious and widely known journals, i.e., The Lancet, The British Medical Journal (BMJ), and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), published between 2015 and 2019. To analyze the data, the RANGE program as a robust tool for developing viable academic word lists was used.Results: Our quantitative and qualitative data analysis yielded a final academic wordlist which consisted of 1,003 words, covered 1,972,420 words in the corpus, and accounted for 10.68% of the medical research articles. Discussion: The high coverage of the extracted academic and technical words provides a reliable source for medical students, medical educators, material designers, and those who are deeply involved in medical English education.

Keywords

• medical research article
• academic word
• technical word
• medical students
• medical teacher