A Comparison of Moves and Language Use in the Abstracts of Laboratory Animal science Review Articles and Cell Biology Research Articles

Abstract

The aims of this study were to compare (1) the frequency of moves, (2) move sequencing pattern, and (3) language use in terms of tenses, verbs, voice, and types of sentence in three high-frequency moves found in the abstracts of both laboratory animal science review articles (LARA) and cell biology research articles (CBRA). The corpus consisted of 100 abstracts: 50 LARA and 50 CBRA abstracts published between 2012 and 2014 by the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research Journal (ILAR) and the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), selected by stratified random sampling and simple random sampling. The framework of Taddio et al. (1994), which consists of eight moves: purpose, research design, setting, subjects, intervention, measurement, results, and conclusion, was used to analyze the data. The results reveal that (1) three high-frequency moves occurred the most frequently in both types of abstracts. (2) Ten move sequencing patterns occurred in the LARA abstracts, and move sequencing six patterns occurred in the CBRA abstracts. (3) The most frequently used language forms were: the present tense, finite verbs, the active voice, and two types of sentence occurred in the moves presenting background, purpose, and conclusions: simple sentences and complex sentences.