Rhetorical moves and linguistic realisations of economics research article abstracts in international and Vietnam-based journals

Despite the existing scholarship on the contrastive genre-based studies of research abstracts across contexts and cultures, this strand of research is underexplored in Vietnam. Motivated by this gap, this study aims to identify and compare the move structures and the linguistic realisations of English-medium economics abstracts published in two highly-ranked international and Vietnam-based journals. Drawing on the models by Santos and Hyland, each corpus of 20 research abstracts from The Quarterly Journal of Economics and VNU Journal of Science: Economics and Business was manually analysed, respectively. The genre analysis was performed at the macro level of move frequency, move length and move patterns and the micro level of verb tenses and aspects, voice, that-complement clauses, modals/semi-modals and self-mentions. The results show that both groups of economics researchers did not strictly conform to the linear Introduction-Purpose-Method-Product-Conclusion (IPMPrC) move sequence. They regarded Method and Product as obligatory moves and allocated the most textual space to the Product move. Linguistically, they favoured the present simple, active voice and that-complement clauses controlled by reporting verbs. Modal/semi-modal verbs and self-mention words were utilised in certain moves. Despite these similarities, there were some discrepancies in the move patterns and rhetorical strategies, indicating that international scholars structured their abstracts with greater rhetorical complexity and made more effort to express their authorial identity. The findings highlight the influences of disciplinary nature, discourse community and socio-cultural factors on research abstract writing, thus serving as a resource for ESP instructors, students and researchers to improve their genre awareness and academic writing skills.