An investigation of moves in research abstracts of Nature Journal

Abstract

          This linguistic study aimed to investigate rhetorical moves of scientific research abstracts published in Nature Journal. The data source included fifty research abstracts published from 2011 to 2015. These abstracts were analyzed based on Santos’ move framework which contains five main moves: Situating the research, presenting the research, describing the methodology, summarizing the results, and discussing the research. To increase the reliability of the data analysis, the inter-raters
(a researcher, an English native scholar and a master degree student) verified the data. The results revealed that all main five moves were found in fifty collected abstracts. Among the five moves, Move 4, summarizing the results, was found as the most conventional move, which accounted for 100%. The following frequently found moves were Move 1, Situating the research, and Move 5, discussing the research (96%). Move 3, describing the methodology, was found at 86% of the corpus. The last move which had the least frequency was Move 2, presenting the research (60%).