Building Science on Autobiographical Experience: Self-writing as an Ethical Resource in Medical Reviews

This paper investigates the role played by personal narrative in a corpus of immunology and virology reviews, published in specialised journals from 2000 to the present day. Medical reviews are an interesting example of how stories of scholarly experience may become methods of inquiry that create shared knowledge (Myers 1991) and contribute to the cognitive rediscovery of the topic, involving the construction of identity, gender and ethics. So, autobiographical scientific experience may become a “value” to be narrated and an “ethical” resource to engage the community’s participation (Graham 2004; Smith and Watson [2001] 2010; Di Summa Knoop 2017). Through a quantitative exploration of data which are narrative-related, used to personalise knowledge or interpret attitudes and events (Huddleston and Pullum 2002), the qualitative analysis focuses on the various communicative strategies deployed in narrative stages (Labov 2001) to construct authenticity and validity in medical reviews (Hyland 2018). Results will show that the discursive choices made significantly contribute to the linguistic projection of authorial identity, ethics and gender reproduction in this genre; they will also reveal the use of other communicative strategies which are quite unexpected in evidence-based discourse.