“The Discussion (and/or Closing) section of empirical research articles: What needs to be said and how, to get published in English-medium international journals”
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2018-02-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Researchers all over the world are nowadays subject to the pressure to publish-or-perish more than ever before. Multilingual researchers often consider themselves at a disadvantage in comparison to scholars who have English as their first language, particularly as journals in languages other than English do not accrue the high impact of English language journals. Of all the genres that are published in a scientific journal, the most relevant for multilingual researchers is the empirical research article (ERA). The sections that social scientists, in particular, find most difficult to write in English are the ERA discussion and conclusion. In this presentation I report findings of a comparison of the generic structure of discussion (and/or conclusion) sections between international-English-medium journals and Spanish-medium journals. The comparison yields interesting crosscultural differences across the two contexts and across the social sciences and other sciences. Awareness of them might help multilingual scholars in the social sciences to write this section more efficiently when targeting international scientific journals. The presentation then focusses on the social sciences and reveals the most salient language resources employed in English to realize the communicative functions that are most characteristic of ERAs in an international context. It is hoped that this kind of study might inspire similar comparisons across English and other languages.
Description
Seminar
Keywords
publish-or-perish, empirical research article (ERA), crosscultural differences, multilingual