A cross-disciplinary comparison of boosting in research articles

Abstract

Boosting, using terms such as obviously and of course, is a communicative strategy for expressing firm commitment to statements. This article describes an interdisciplinary comparison of the extent, form, and function of boosters in research articles (RAs) across six academic disciplines: Business, Language and Linguistics, Public and Social Administration, Law, Physics, and Environmental Science. The investigation involved quantitative and qualitative analysis of a 1,250,000 words corpus gathered from 216 articles published in leading journals (six journals from each discipline and six articles from each journal). It was found that the boosters in the corpus played a significant role in the efforts of authors to persuade readers of the validity of their claims. The highest proportion of boosters was found in Language and Linguistics and the lowest in Environmental Science. Considerable interdisciplinary variation was also found in the form of boosters: for example, a different type and narrower range of boosters was found in the two sciences than in the other four disciplines. The results have implications for our understanding of the RA and of scientific expression, and also for teaching ESP to students who are writing dissertations and research papers. We suggest that competence in research writing includes a developed knowledge of boosting.