The IMRD overflow phenomenon: form and function of Japanese-language journal documents

Abstract

Despite the growing body of research on the overall organization of documents from academic journals, little is known about the use of IMRD-based structures-the pattern composed of Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections and its variants-in publication categories other than the research article. The current paper addresses this phenomenon with the focus on Japanese-language journal documents. Both the structure and the basic function of 186 documents in Japanese of five categories different from the research article were analyzed. It was found that IMRD-based structures are consistently used in two and sparsely used in one of the five categories. Additionally, it was found that most documents exhibiting these structures report some kind of investigation. The results point to a close connection between form and function; the overflow of IMRD-based structures seems to be an external sign of the advance in academic journals of publication categories centered on research processes.

Categorias fundamentais de documentos de periódicos acadêmicos japoneses

“…Soma et al (2012) descrevem um estudo acerca da prevalência de infecções por diferentes tipos de vírus em cães em cinco pet shops do Japão. Destaca-se que esses documentos, assim como muitos outros do tipo tanpō que relatam pesquisas, exibem estrutura associada ao padrão IMRD, o que reforça a relação entre estrutura e propósito aparente(ARAGÃO, 2016). Documentos tanpō com a função de oferecer tributo a um acadêmico falecido foram encontrados somente na revista Oriento, o que sugere que tal propósito pode não ser comum em trabalhos da categoria.…”