Exploring rhetorical moves in a digital academic genre: a cross-disciplinary study of the highlights section

This cross-disciplinary paper explores the ways in which writers promote theirresearch articles in the highlights section of journals available online as a digitalacademic genre. A corpus of highlights from 300 research articles was randomlyselected from journals in two major domains of knowledge, hard sciences andsoft sciences. The corpus contained texts from the fields of (1) Chemistry and(2) Computer Science representing hard sciences and from (3) Linguistics and (4)Management representing soft sciences published in reputable journals in 2018and 2019. The corpus was analysed in terms of the promotional and rhetoricalmoves based on a model developed by the researchers using the uAM CorpusTool. The results show that despite similarities in the use of rhetorical moves, forexample, Promoting the results (Move 4) as the most frequently used move in bothcorpora, there were disciplinary variations in the highlights section. Whereashard science majors give secondary importance to promoting the value (Move 2) oftheir research, soft science majors promoted the scene of the study (Move 1) in thehighlights. Analyses of the cyclical patterns of the highlights reveal that whereashard sciences researchers combined promoting the results with promoting themethodological issues (Move 3), soft sciences writers showcased their results as wellas promoting background information (Move 1) related to their actual research.