The use of content analysis in the assessment of medical controversies
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Updated: Aug 16, 2026

A Metadata Extraction Approach for Clinical Case Reports to Enable Advanced Understanding of Biomedical Concepts
Published on: September 20, 2018
1Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, Parktown, South Africa.
Abstract:
Medicine is fraught with controversies, and several strategies have been developed in order to reach rational conclusions. Examples are using more subjects or an improved research design, developing consensus statements or using meta-analysis. An additional strategy is described in this paper. The language content of scientific papers is examined to establish whether the authors use factual (informational) language or emotional appeals (directive language) to convince the reader. This type of content analysis is then applied to a sample controversy. The paper shows that directive language content analysis can be applied effectively to scientific publications to clarify the basis of and reasoning behind some controversies.
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