ArticleMedical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran2025
Exploring Hedging Devices in Scientific Research Papers: A Content Analysis Study of the 'Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran'.
Article in Medical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Hedging generally serves several important rhetorical and epistemic purposes in academic writing, allowing authors to qualify their claims, delay potential challenges, and preserve their credibility. This study aimed to identify the most frequently used types of hedging devices in basic science and clinical science research studies and to determine whether there was a significant difference in the use of hedging devices between these two types of research studies published in the Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran (MJIRI) in 2024. Methods: This study employed a quantitative, corpus-based research design. Three PhD holders in applied linguistics examined the whole 150 published papers in 2024 in MJIRI and extracted the hedging devices manually from the conclusion sections of the papers. The frequency and type of the hedging devices were counted and recorded. The number and frequencies of the basic science and clinical science papers were recorded separately for later comparison. Hu and Cao's (2011) simplified taxonomy was used to classify the data. Descriptive statistics and Chi-Squared Tests were run using SPSS version 22 to answer the questions. Results: In the clinical science papers, hedging were used 330 times, while the number was 154 for the basic science. In all four categories of the taxonomy, clinical studies enjoyed more hedging devices than basic science ones. The result of the inferential test showed that there was no statistically significant difference in using hedging devices between basic science and clinical science research studies ( Conclusion: Hedging is not limited to specific disciplines but is also influenced by journal standards and cultural factors. The findings underline the importance of balancing hedging with clarity, especially in medical writing where precise communication is essential.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.