Genre Analysis of Abstracts of Research Articles Published in Biostatistics

Abstract

Genre studies have contributed to revealing the communicative purposes and structural properties particular to specific discourse communities. Research articles (RA) have been the focus of most genre studies for the past four decades. RA abstract is important because it summarizes the work, persuades readers, and ‘sells’ the article locally and internationally. An emerging academic discipline that has been under studied is Biostatistics. The study aimed at exploring the move structure and lexico-grammatical features of RA abstracts published in Biostatistics. Forty (40) RA abstracts were extracted from four different Biostatistics journals. Hyland’s five-move structure model was adopted to guide the analysis. Using Hüttner’s classification model, the most frequent move was the Product, with a 100% occurrence. While the Introduction move was core, the Purpose, Method, Product and Conclusion moves were obligatory. It was revealed that the abstracts follow the completely linear five-move structure, i.e., M1>M2>M3>M4>M5. While the study revealed that the total number of words in an abstract is 244, the Product move had the highest textual space in the abstract. With the linguistic realisation of the moves, the past verb tense was preferred, occurring frequently in the Method move. The Introduction and Conclusion moves recorded frequent use of modal verbs. Personal pronouns were characteristic of the Method move. These linguistic realisations served to differentiate one move from the others. While the study contributes to research on RA abstracts generally, it guides the practice of abstract designing in Biostatistics. Finally, it offers insights for further research.