Rhetorical and phraseological features of research article introductions: Variation among five social science disciplines

This study investigated variation in the rhetorical and phraseological features of research article introductions among five social science disciplines. Our dataset consisted of the introduction sections of 500 published research articles from Anthropology, Applied Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. All texts in the dataset were manually annotated for rhetorical moves and steps by a team of seven researchers using an extensively adapted version of Swales’ (2004) revised Create a Research Space (CARS) model. Our rhetorical and phraseological analysis of the corpus revealed substantial disciplinary variation in both the distribution of rhetorical move-steps and the associations between phrase-frames and rhetorical move-steps among the five social science disciplines. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of disciplinary variation in the rhetorical and linguistic features of research article writing and have useful implications for academic writing research and pedagogy.