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This article appeared in the Autumn 1999 edition of Short Words, the newsletter of Tim Albert Training. It was written by Tim Albert.

Active voice is more common in general medical journals

General medical journals are twice as likely as their specialist counterparts to have articles written in the active voice.

An examination of 300 papers, taken from six difference journals, looked at whether the word 'we' appeared in the Methods section.

For the New England Journal, the Lancet and the BMJ, 'we' was used in this section in 65 per cent of the articles.

For the Journal of Pediatrics, Pediatric Research and Archives of Disease in Childhood, only 27 per cent of the articles used 'we' in the Methods section.

'This is an interesting finding and we can only speculate as to the reason', says Tim Albert, who along with Kathryn Hampson undertook the research. 'One possibility is that the general journals have more staff and therefore the articles are edited more heavily. But is does contradict the widely held view that all science writers should use the passive voice'.

Other findings in the study were that US journals tended to favour titles with verbs in them, the number of authors seems to rise in direct proportion to the status of the journal, and the Lancet favours more sensational first sentences.

Further details can be found in the article 'Tim Albert reveals the secret structure of scientific papers'. The full article can be found in 'Research' on our website.

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