“Boa leitura!”: análise do gênero editorial em periódicos científicos e de seus recursos de interpessoalidade

Abstract

This research aims to describe editorials in scientific journals as a genre. These texts will be analysed as to its constituents of theme, composition and style, according to the studies of Bakhtin’s Circle. For that purpose, this kind of editorial is inserted into a system of genres in the scientific sphere of human action; similarities and differences with journalistic editorials (which are more commonly dealt with in liguistic studies) are, then, taken into account. The theoretical foundation is supported by Social Discourse Theory, Textual Linguistics and Genre Analysis; it it also reinforced by elements of Scholarly Communication and Systemic Functional Linguistics. This is an interpretive research, with quali-quantitative analysis. The corpus consists of 89 texts collected from three journals of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation: Cadernos de Saúde Pública; História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos; Revista Eletrônica de Comunicação, Informação & Inovação em Saúde (Reciis). These texts were obtained from different chronological periods covering 1985 to 2019. Editorials in scientific journals are part of a family of genres that sometimes are closer and sometimes are farther from editorials in newspapers, information magazines and thematic magazines. Texts in the corpus are published in an opening section of the aforementioned scientific journals, that can be called “editorial” or “editor's note”. As a general trend, they present graphic neutrality. The most common themes are scholarly communication and matters related to the areas of these journals: public health, history of science and health, communication and health information. The most frequent communicative purposes are to express an opinion, to comment on the journal's operation, to present texts published in that issue, and to inform of a scientific event in the community. The most distinctive features of scientific journal editorials in comparison with those in the journalistic sphere are the author's signature and explicit positioning in the text, using the first person, among other resources of the interpersonal systems of negotiation and appraisal. Through editorials, the editor builds a scientific community and dialogues with it. The interpersonal resources of language establish relationships of solidarity, through which attitudes are negotiated regarding the themes addressed in the editorials. Genre is a dynamic entity and, therefore, scientific journal editorials are also subject to changes in the communicational dynamics of science and to reformulations in evaluation mechanisms. Compositional construction and thematic content are the aspects in which changes are most noticeable.