Rhetorical Analysis of Academic Journal

Nature Photonics is one of the top journals in optical engineering. Unfortunately, the U of A Library does not carry hard copies of the journal, but they have monthly electronic copies dating back from 2006. Here is the most recent issue, published in March of 2016.

Authors in this issue:

• Lei Wu, Yonghao Zhang, Yian Lei & Jason M. Reese
• Tengfei Zhang, Huicong Chang, Yingpeng Wu, Peishuang Xiao, Ningbo Yi, Yanhong Lu, Yanfeng Ma, Yi Huang, Kai Zhao, Yongsheng Chen, Xiao-Qing Yan, Zhi-Bo Liu & Jian-Guo Tian
• Sarah Kurtz, Harry Atwater, Angus Rockett, Tonio Buonassisi, Christiana Honsberg & John Benner
• Ole Sigmund, Jakob S. Jensen & Lars H. Frandsen
• Bing Shen, Peng Wang, Randy Polson & Rajesh Menon
• Alexander Y. Piggott, Jesse Lu, Konstantinos G. Lagoudakis, Jan Petykiewicz, Thomas M. Babinec & Jelena Vučković
• Lachlan Rogers & Fedor Jelezko
• Nick Hartmann & James M. Glownia
• Daniele Faccio
• Seamus Holden & Daniel Sage
• Noriaki Horiuchi
• F. Fras, Q. Mermillod, G. Nogues, C. Hoarau, C. Schneider, M. Kamp, S. Höfling, W. Langbein & J. Kasprzak
• Sabine Keiber, Shawn Sederberg, Alexander Schwarz, Michael Trubetskov, Volodymyr Pervak, Ferenc Krausz & Nicholas Karpowicz
• Kevin A. Fischer, Kai Müller, Armand Rundquist, Tomas Sarmiento, Alexander Y. Piggott, Yousif Kelaita, Constantin Dory, Konstantinos G. Lagoudakis & Jelena Vučković
• Piotr Ryczkowski, Margaux Barbier, Ari T. Friberg, John M. Dudley & Goëry Genty
• T. J. Hammond, Graham G. Brown, Kyung Taec Kim, D. M. Villeneuve & P. B. Corkum
• K. C. Prince, E. Allaria, C. Callegari, R. Cucini, G. De Ninno, S. Di Mitri, B. Diviacco, E. Ferrari, P. Finetti, D. Gauthier, L. Giannessi, N. Mahne, G. Penco, O. Plekan, L. Raimondi, P. Rebernik, E. Roussel, C. Svetina, M. Trovò, M. Zangrando, M. Negro, P. Carpeggiani, M. Reduzzi, G. Sansone, A. N. Grum-Grzhimailo, E. V. Gryzlova, S. I. Strakhova, K. Bartschat, N. Douguet, J. Venzke, D. Iablonskyi, Y. Kumagai, T. Takanashi, K. Ueda, A. Fischer, M. Coreno, F. Stienkemeier, Y. Ovcharenko, T. Mazza & M. Meyer
• Sunil Mittal, Sriram Ganeshan, Jingyun Fan, Abolhassan Vaezi & Mohammad Hafezi
• Christopher G. Yale, F. Joseph Heremans, Brian B. Zhou, Adrian Auer, Guido Burkard & David D. Awschalom
• Weilin Liu, Ming Li, Robert S. Guzzon, Erik J. Norberg, John S. Parker, Mingzhi Lu, Larry A. Coldren & Jianping Yao
• Chien-Hung Chiang & Chun-Guey Wu

The authors are mostly grad students. Others are research professors and some are in industry. These people also come from all over the world. As Nature Photonics is an international journal, the research come from many individuals of different countries.

Purpose and Audience:

The intended audience of the this publication are definitely experts in the field. When reading the summaries and abstracts of the different articles in the issue, high level terminology is used and builds upon the expectation that the reader already had knowledge in the field.

Context:

The editorial sets up the context of this specific issue. the editorial is titled "Identity Crisis" and it talks about a not-for-profit initiative called ORCID that was created in 2009. ORCID's purpose is to assign a unique 16-digit ID code to every researcher.

The idea is that many people have the same name, so identifying researchers by name alone is not sufficient to identify someone. Instead an ID number allows researchers to be "clearly identified and connected to their contributions across time, disciplines and borders" The initiative gained a lot of support and more than 250 countries have registered.

The purpose is to encourage the researcher in Nature Photonics to register with ORCID, as it is not yet mandatory for the journal like it is for journals like IEEE, PLoS, eLife, Science, and EMBO.

 Message:

The opening piece of the issue about ORCID was written to persuade researchers into registering. Its message was towards the scientific community and the sharing/identification of research.

The actual articles had the message of presenting research and educating other experts in the field. 

Purpose:

Most of the content were correspondence articles which are reaction texts to question sin previous issues. Researchers would choose a question to answer, title their article with that question and show the answer with their research. These responses are intended for the original questioner, which means they are written to fellow experts in the field and concentration.

There were also a lot of news articles that are intended for people with less knowledge in the field. They consist of recent discoveries or massive breakthroughs. However, these news articles are less research papers but more summary and communication.