Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts in English for Academic Purposes Journals: Exploring the Possible Variations across the Venues of Research

Abstract

Research article (RA) abstracts play a pivotal role in settling the fate of the academic papers. Despite the abundance of research on investigating the generic structure of this academic genre, the variations in its move patterns between the two venues within a single area of research seem to have remained untouched. The current study attempted to explore the constituent moves and move patterns of RA abstracts published in a local (Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes) and an international (The Journal of English for Academic Purposes) journal in the field of applied linguistics. Drawing on Hyland’s (2000) five-move model, the RA abstracts were analyzed. The results indicated that the abstracts published in the two journals included the conventional moves. Furthermore, the most frequent moves were the purpose, method, and product in the two corpora. Moreover, although the results of the chi-square test pointed to no significant difference in terms of the frequency of the moves in the abstracts, the analysis divulged variations in the move patterns across the two sets of articles. The findings carry pedagogical implications for the academic writing course designers, materials developers, and instructors to enhance the novice researchers’ familiarity with the writing conventions to facilitate their accommodation by the scientific communities.

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“…Several analytical models have been proposed to analyse RA abstracts: Create a Research Space (CARS) model and Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) framework by Swales (1990Swales ( , 2004); Hyland's (2000) five-move model; Bhatia's (1993) four-move classification; and Santos's (1996) five-move model. Of these analytical models, Hyland's (2000) IPMPrC has been extensively applied in several studies (Bonsu, 2021;Bonsu & Afful, 2022;Darabad, 2016;El-Daks, 2018;Saidi & Talebi, 2021) due to its comprehensiveness. As such, we adopted Hyland's model to analyse the abstracts.…”

“…Empirical studies on genre analysis of RA abstracts employ a variety of linguistic and textual approaches to investigate the communicative functions and patterns of abstracts across different academic disciplines and research genres. The textual analysis approach has dominated most studies (Bonsu, 2021;Hyland, 2000;Pho, 2008;Saidi & Talebi, 2021;Tseng, 2011). By examining conventions and variations in abstracts, these studies shed light on how scholars use language to convey scientific knowledge, construct research identities, and negotiate disciplinary norms and expectations.…”

“…Bhatia (1993, p. 78) intended the abstract "as a description or factual summary of a longer report, designed to give the reader an accurate and concise understanding of the entire text". Saidi and Talebi (2021) claim that abstracts determine the fate of scientific papers. This means that the acceptance, rejection, or assumed motivation of RA depends largely on the abstract (Huckin, 2001;Ren and Li, 2011).…”

Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in English Research Article Abstracts Written by Non-Native Authors: A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study

“…Previous studies on this academic genre have attempted to reveal its rhetorical organization (e.g., Al-Khasawneh, 2017;Gessesse, 2016;Ji, 2015;Saidi & Talebi, 2021), linguistic features (e.g., Kozubíková Šandová, 2021; Kuhi & Mousavi, 2015), cross-disciplinary and crosscultural variations (e.g., Alonso Almeida, 2014; Belyakova, 2017;Hu & Cao 2011;Martín, 2003;Perales-Escudero & Swales, 2011;Sanz, 2006;Van Bonn & Swales 2007;Yang 2013), interpersonal features (e.g. Lorés Sanz et al, 2010), subjectivity, evaluation and engagement (e.g.…”

Metadiscourse patterns in academic prose by non-native English writers: A cross-disciplinary perspective

“…To date, studies on the RA abstract have described their rhetorical organization following Swales's (1990) move analysis (e.g. Ji 2015, Gessesse 2016) or Hyland's (2004) five-move model (Saidi & Talebi 2021), examined their linguistic features (e.g. Kuhi & Mousavi 2015, Kozubíková Šandová 2021, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural variations (e.g.…”