Genre practices in mechanical engineering academic articles: Prototypicality and intra-disciplinary variation

Abstract

Since move analysis was proposed by Swales (1990), numerous studies have adopted this method to explore organisational patterns in different sections of research articles in a range of disciplines. However, research articles in mechanical engineering have attracted scant attention in genre analysis research. This paper will be among the first to identify move structures of the Results Discussion section of research articles in this under-explored discipline. To this end, it draws on a corpus of 18 original research articles that employ different research types (experimental, theoretical and mixed). The findings show the prototypicality as well as variability in genre practices associated with different disciplinary contexts. The findings have important implications for the design of corpora used in genre analysis