Differences in the structure of scientific discourse with individual and collaborative authorship of publications

Abstract

Within the framework of scientific discourse, the article occupies a central place in the construction and dissemination of knowledge in the scientific community. At the same time, collaborative authorship is becoming increasingly widespread in the scientific community. The syntactic and semantic differences between the texts of collaborations and individual authors present an urgent problem and remain poorly understood. This determines the purpose of the study — to identify differences in the structure of scientific discourse with individual and collaborative authorship of publications. At the preliminary stage of the study, an unstructured research interview was conducted on the specifics of writing scientific articles individually and as part of author teams. The main research is devoted to the analysis of the semantic and syntactic structure of texts using the method of relational situational analysis (RSA), which allows you to automatically identify the correspondence of the syntaxemic structure of a sentence to the logical structure of the actions described in this sentence. The study compared the texts of 201 scientific articles in Russian from the leading psychological journals included in WoS and Scopus, divided into corpora by type of authorship (individual-collaborative) and genres (theoretical articles and reviews vs empirical methodological articles). During the study, it was revealed that the articles written in collaboration have higher lexical coherence, they are more syntactically correct. The volume of the text of a scientific article on psychology is on average 9% more with individual authorship compared with collaborative writing. The semantic and syntactic differences between the texts of articles by individual authors and collaborations have a genre differentiation. In theoretical articles and reviews of collaborations, the syntactic complexity and semantic coherence of the text are higher, the traditional structure of the statement prevails: the thesis is briefly postulated and then fully justified. With individual authorship, the main idea is more often formulated after the context, while reformulation is more often used in the texts of individual authors. The meta-discourse in theoretical articles also differs significantly: the author’s position is more represented by individual authors, and “reader involvement” is in the case of co-authorship. In empirical and methodological articles, the main differences are revealed in the specifics of meta-discourse: the author’s position, unlike the genre of theoretical articles, is more inherent in the texts of collaborations.