Reporting Verbs in Results and Discussion Sections of Scientific Research Articles of Hard and Soft Disciplines

Abstract

Reporting Verbs have gained considerable attention in corpus-based studies during the previous years. It is necessary to utilize reporting verbs appropriately to establish the writer’s claims and situate them across formerly published studies. Given the importance of the reporting verbs, the current study explored the rates and the differences of reporting verbs across science disciplines. Hence, a total number of 200 Results and Discussion sections of research articles consisting of 50 excerpts from the four science categories introduced by Science Direct web of science, namely Life Science, Social Science and Humanities, Physical Science and Engineering, and Health Sciences were gathered and used as the corpus and analyzed based on Thomas and Hawes's framework. The results showed that authors in Life Science and Health Science used more reporting verbs in comparison to the other two science disciplines. Furthermore, the tentative reporting verbs had a higher frequency than certainty reporting verbs. The research findings have several implications for novice researchers within various science disciplines in reporting their claims using reporting verbs and for course designers to treat crucial problems of the students in their academic writings.

Keywords

• corpus study
• reporting verbs
• research articles
• results and discussion sections