Pedro Angel Martín

A genre analysis of English and Spanish research paper abstracts in experimental social sciences

Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent there is rhetorical variation between the research article abstracts written in English for international journals and those written in Spanish and published in Spanish journals in the area of experimental social sciences. To this end, the structural units that constitute the macrostructure of these texts have been analysed comparatively. The results show that the Spanish abstracts in this field largely follow the international conventions based on the norms established by the English-speaking international academic community, as they present the four basic structural units (Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion) which constitute the different sections of the underlying research article. However, some degree of divergence has been found, mainly in the frequency of occurrence of the Results unit, and Move 2 in the abstract introductions, which is where writers justify their work in their research field as a way of creating a niche. The rhetorical variables found across the two languages may be mainly explained by the different expectations that the members of the international and Spanish scientific communities have.