This paper investigates a special type of recurrent expressions, lexical bundles, defined as a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). Considering the importance of this group of multi-word sequences in academic prose, this study explores the forms and syntactic structures of three- and four-word bundles in English abstracts writte...

CONTEXT The most-read section of a research article is the abstract, and therefore it is especially important that the abstract be accurate. OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis that providing authors with specific instructions about abstract accuracy will result in improved accuracy. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial of an educational intervention specifying 3 types of common defects in abstr...

Medical discourse has recently attracted much scholarly attention. However, few studies have concentrated on both the overall rhetorical structure of the research article (RA) and the specific lexicogrammatical features of the texts, particularly English-Persian contrastive studies on medical RAs. Relying on Nwogu’s (1997) framework, the present study aimed at providing a macroanalysis of the I...

In light of the understanding that the analysis of the generic features of different academic genres can enhance the ability of non-native members of academic discourse communities to understand, and where appropriate, to produce them, the present study aimed at investigating the dominant generic structure of research articles in mathematics. To start with a relatively narrow focus, a corpus of...

BACKGROUND Retrieval tests have assumed that the abstract is a true surrogate of the entire text. However, the frequency of terms in abstracts has never been compared to that of the articles they represent. Even though many sources are now available in full-text, many still rely on the abstract for retrieval. METHODS 1,138 articles with their abstracts were downloaded from Journal of the Amer...

Abstract Since the abstract can be found at the beginning of most scientific articles and is an essential part of the article, several attempts have been made to explore the rhetorical moves of abstracts in various research fields. These studies dealt only with accepted articles since they can be easily accessed. Although the findings of such works have some pedagogical implications for academi...

INTRODUCTION The video abstract has emerged in recent years as a new way of communicating the results of scholarly enquiry. For library-based journal publishers who want to support multimodal scholarship, it is useful to understand the potential benefit and impact of incorporating video abstracts into their publications. This paper provides an overview of the growth of video abstracts in scienc...

Flaws in research papers are common but it may require arduous detective work to unravel them. Checklists are helpful, but many inconsistencies will only be revealed through repeated crosschecks of every little detail, just like in a crime case. As a major deterrent for dishonesty, raw data from all trials should be posted on a public website. This would also make it much easier to detect error...

Summaries and abstracts of research papers have been traditionally used for many purposes by scientists, research practitioners, editors, programme committee members or reviewers (e.g. to identify relevant papers to read or publish, cite them, explore new fields and disciplines). As a result, many paper repositories only store or expose abstracts, what may limit the capacity of finding the righ...