Chaniporn Bhoomanee.. A comparative study of moves in abstracts of laboratory animal review articles and cell biology research articles. Master's Degree(Applied Linguistics). Mahidol University. Mahidol University Library and Knowledge Center. : Mahidol University, 2016.
A comparative study of moves in abstracts of laboratory animal review articles and cell biology research articles
Abstract:
The objectives of this study were: 1) to investigate the frequency and the sequence of moves in the abstracts of animal review articles in Institute for Laboratory Animal Research Journal (ILAR), 2) to investigate the frequency and the sequence of moves in the abstracts of research articles in Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), 3) to compare the frequency and the sequence of moves in abstracts between laboratory animal review article and cell biology research article, and 4) to investigate the language uses of the highest-frequency move found in the abstracts of laboratory animal review articles and cell biology research articles in terms of verb choices, tenses, voices, and types of sentence. The analytical framework used in this study based on Taddio et al. (1994) who proposed eight moves in the research article abstracts: purpose, research design, setting, subjects, intervention, measurement, results, and conclusion. This study consisted of two corpora collected from ILAR and JCB published in 2012-2014. An entire corpus comprised 100 abstracts selected by using a stratified random sampling and simple random sampling (50 laboratory animal review articles and 50 cell biology research articles). Data analysis composed of three steps: 1) move identification, 2) inter-rater reliability assessment, and 3) comparison of move analysis of two corpora. Three inter-raters analyzed the dataset reliability, and Fleiss' kappa reliability was to measure the agreement of the raters. The statistics used in this study were frequency and percentage. The results revealed that there were nine moves occurring in the abstracts of ILAR, and seven moves appearing in the abstracts of JCB. Specially, this study found a high frequency of new move (background: MB), which differed from Taddio et al. (1994)'s framework. In ILAR corpus, there were three high-frequency moves: MB (94%), M1 (82%), and M8 (54%). In contrast, JCB corpus composed of four high- frequency moves: MB (98%), M8 (96%), M7 (94%), and M1 (60%). Remaining moves occurred in less than 20% of move occurrences. In the case of move sequences, there were ten patterns of moves sequences in ILAR abstracts, while the JCB corpus found six patterns of move sequences. The most frequently used language forms were: finite verbs, present tense, the active voice, and simple sentences to write background sentences.