Dialogization of scientific discourse: from expert monologue to dialogue with the reader (based on Russian-language biological articles from 2005 to 2020)

Abstract

   The scientific article has long been treated as an impersonal, maximally objectified genre, yet over the past two decades researchers have documented its gradual personalization and convergence with conversational and popular-science modes of exposition. It remains unclear how robust and measurable this shift is within the hard natural sciences, traditionally the most committed to impersonal norms.    The aim of this study  is to empirically establish and quantitatively describe the dynamics of dialogization in Russian-language biological articles published between 2005 and 2020.    The material comprised a corpus of 123 articles from leading Russian biological journals, totaling approximately 1.2 million word tokens, divided into four time slices (2005, 2010, 2015, 2020); frequencies were normalized per 100 words and compared using the Kruskal-Wallis test and pairwise Mann-Whitney U-tests with Bonferroni correction. Three key vectors of change were identified: a 2.4-fold increase in first-person plural pronouns (from 0.042 to 0.103 per 100 words), the emergence of rhetorical questions, entirely absent in 2005 and present in 12 % of articles by 2020, and a 3.5-fold rise in evaluative speech clichés such as “strangely enough” and “it should be noted”. These developments are interpreted in the context of institutional change (scientometrics), the digitalization of scholarly communication, and a broader softening of stylistic boundaries in contemporary Russian. The findings are relevant for journal editors and reviewers assessing the acceptability of dialogic elements in biological writing, and they open a perspective for comparison with other natural-science and humanities disciplines.