Chatchanan Yathip.. A comparison of moves in scientific abstracts of standard and predatory journals. Master's Degree(Applied Linguistics). Mahidol University. Mahidol University Library and Knowledge Center. : Mahidol University, 2016.
A comparison of moves in scientific abstracts of standard and predatory journals
Abstract:
The aims of this linguistics study were to investigate and compare moves, submoves, move embedding, and move sequences in scientific abstracts of standard and predatory journals. Data was collected from 50 abstracts published during 2011 to 2015 from Nature journal, which represents the standard journals while the other 50 abstracts were collected from International Journal of Current Science, representing for the predatory journals. Santos's (1996) model of move analysis in abstracts was used as a framework for analyzing them. The model contains five primary moves: "Situating the research", "Presenting the research", "Describing the methodology", "Summarizing the results", and "Discussing the research". To increase the accuracy of the data analysis, three inter-raters: one professional scientist who is competent in English and two graduate students in the applied linguistics program were invited to verify the analyzed data. Moreover, two English teachers (one Thai and one native speaker) randomly selected the analysis results to check for accuracy. Inter-rater reliability among three inter-raters and the researcher were computed by using the Fleiss's Kappa statistic. The result of this statistic was 0.7, indicating substantial correlation and consistency among the raters and the researcher. The study showed that all five moves in both corpora and most of moves existed more than 60% in the corpus, except Move 1 "Situating the research" in the predatory corpus was found fewer than 60% of the time. The present study found nine submoves in the corpus of the standard abstracts. In contrast, the predatory abstract corpus had only six submoves without the occurrences of three submoves including Move 1 Submove 1 B "Citing the previous research", Move 1 Submove 1 C "Extending previous research", and Move 2 Submove 2 "Hypothesis raising". Furthermore, the standard and predatory corpora found seven types of move embedding of which six were commonly found in both standard and predatory corpora. Nevertheless, Move 2 "Presenting the research" and Move 4 "Summarizing the results" embedded in Move 3 "Describing the methodology" (M3/2,4) was found only in the standard corpus, while Move 3 "Describing the methodology" embedded in Move 5 "Discussing the research" (Move 3/5) was the type of move embedding only occurring in the predatory corpus. In addition, the findings showed that the standard corpus consisted of 26 move sequences in five patterns; on the contrary, the predatory corpus was found to have 41 move sequences in 11 patterns. Noticeably, there were five move sequences commonly found in both standard and predatory corpora.