building credibility and visibility in alternative and complementary medicine: a linguistic and discursive perspective

As non-mainstream medical practice is making headway and resisting the dominant discourse of biomedical practice, there is the need to understand how non-mainstream, alternative/complementary scholars provide a credible representation of themselves by creating a convincing discourse from within the boundaries of their discipline while enhancing visibility and impact to stay ahead of competition in today’s regime of ‘patronage and fear’ of academic life. using a representative corpus of academic articles in this field, i look at how authors ‘position’ themselves and carve out a distinct knowledge space that reflects their professional identity and promotes the quality and credibility of their own research to the scientific community. to do this, i consider the markers of evaluation and stance in academic discourse analysis for their meaning making, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, and elucidate a context for interpretation, showing how patterns of promotional language are used to enhance visibility of, and attention for, both research and researchers within a super-crowded and competitive world of digital scholarly publishing.