universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

2667.1.1 The productivity of the genreIn the present study, two distinct patterns can be noticed concerning theproductivity of the genre. One is in linguistics, where 75% of the journals analyzed carryBRs, with the genre showing vitality and even expansion in its adoption by academicjournals.In Chapter 4, we have seen how some linguistics journals seem to be in a transitionphase, gradually establishing BR journal sections, while in economics and chemistry,there are few reviewing journals and there seems to be no perspective on that directionconsidering that, since articles seem to be replacing books as the main means tocommunicate research results, BRs are expected to diminish in importance in thesefields. As pointed out by the economics editor, books are falling in importance relativeto articles due to, among other things, the tendency of the field to become moremathematical: since mathematics is an economic language, economists choose to writetheir research results in article-form, saving time and space. In addition, in the naturalsciences, there is a rapid accretion of knowledge, with each new finding building onrecent research. Since time becomes of the essence, information nets find in journals amore dynamic means of communication than the traditional books. In fact, only 40% ofthe top journals analyzed in economics and 35% in chemistry carry BRs.This kind of contextual constraint on the uses of a genre attain greater significanceif we analyze the example of Problems of Communism, one of the top reviewing journalsin economics according to the 1989 Social Sciences Citation Index (Garfield, 1989b).