Research article introduction, among other sections, plays a pivotal role in illuminating the significance of the research topic being investigated and in situating the contribution of the research to the body of knowledge in the field. A quality introduction can determine the successful publication process in international journals. Genre analysis through move analysis, therefore, has generated several models to organize the introduction section rhetorically well. However, little attention is devoted to exploring the introduction written by novice and experienced authors. Hence, this study aims to examine the similarities and discrepancies of rhetorical organization of introduction sections written by both groups in Indonesian context. Eight journal article introductions were analyzed by using Swales' ( 2004) revised creating a Research Space model. The moves and steps were analysed, followed by analysing the linguistic realizations of the introductions. The findings revealed that both novice and experienced Indonesian authors manifested the three moves, i.e. Move 1, Establishing a territory; Move 2, establishing a niche; and Move 3, presenting the present work. However, experienced authors were more aware of indicating the gap than novice counterparts before presenting their works in the step level. The realizations of some linguistic features (i.e. tense, voice, hedging, and citation patterns) were further discussed between both groups. This study concludes that the authors' expertise with international publication partly affects the quality of their introduction. Pedagogical implication and recommendation for future research are also presented.

<em>This study investigates the similarities and disparities of the rhetorical organizations of introduction sections in soft and hard science international journals written by Indonesian scholars and of the linguistic features employed to signal the moves. A corpus of ten introductions in the field of soft and hard science (five introductions each) was analyzed based on </em><em>Swales' (2004)</em><em> Create A Research Space (CARS) model. Findings were obtained through analyzing the moves and steps, as well as the linguistic realizations of the introductions. The analysis reveals that while Step 1 of Move 3 was an obligatory step, Step 1B of Move 2 and Step 2 of Move 3 were absent in both corpora. In addition, Step 1 of Move 2 was obligatory in soft science but was conventional in soft science corpus. Regarding linguistic features, the results show the influence of the different disciplines on the manifestation of metadiscoursal units (hedges and boosters) to enact the moves across the corpora, whereas no significant discrepancy was identified in the use of verb tense and sentence voice. The findings provide a better understanding of the rhetorical structure of research article introductions for and has pedagogical implications for the writing courses of Indonesian novice scholars.</em>