Application of Terms Approved by the Academy of Persian Language & Literature in Iranian Journals of Medicine with the Dictionary of A Collection of Medical Terms Used as a Reference for Comparison

The present study explores the application of medical terms approved
by the Academy of Persian Language & Literature in Iranian medical journals using the Dictionary of A Collection of Medical Terms as a reference for comparisons. For this purpose, six distinguished Iranian medical journals with the highest impact factors were selected to collect 1547 articles. It was found that the journals using the highest number of approved terms were Journal of Dentistry, Journal of ‘Salmand’ (the Senile), Knowledge and Health Quarterly, Journal of Iranian Vocational Health, Journal of Audiology, and Journal of Life, in an ascending order. The Journal of Dentistry with the lowest Persian to English term ratio of 2.21 and the Journal of Life with the highest Persian to English term ratio of 6.31 used the highest and lowest numbers of English terms, respectively. Another aspect of the study involved identification of the inadequacies of the Dictonary of A Collection of Medical Terms; these included identical equivalents for different terms from the source language, literary terms and some vulgar terms used as scientific terms. Regarding the journals investigated, they exhibited such problems as simultaneous use of both English and Persian terms in the same context, failure to observe Persian affixation rules properly, extreme use of derived forms, use of different word orders for a single compound term, and application of words from two different word categories for a single meaning. Overall, the journals examined seem to have paid no heed in most cases to using terms approved by the Academy.