iranian isi and non-isi medical research articles in english: a comparative esp/eap move analysis*

during recent decades publishing articles in academic journals has become a worldwide urge for all members of academia. there is, however, a widespread belief according to which more value is given to the articles published in internationally-recognized, high standard journals. an issue raised in this regard is whether the articles published in highly prestigious journals are remarkably different from those published in other journals as far as their contents and rhetorical styles are concerned. taking the organization of information/moves into account, the present study seeks the probable differences existing between the two groups of 32 research articles (ras) randomly selected from among iranian isi and non-isi medical journals in english, published between january 2008 and february 2009, through analyzing the introduction and discussion sections of these articles based on the model presented by nwogu (1997). the results of mann-whittney u and correlational tests revealed that moves and sub-moves have been exploited with quite similar frequencies in the two sets of the articles. the frequent use of moves/sub-moves in the sections not commonly stated in the literature, use of meta-discourse markers in the corpus, some marked implications of the findings of esp genre analysis of ras as well as some other findings have also been discussed