”Borders” in the Writing of Academic Texts: Investigating Informativeness in Academic Journal Abstracts

Abstract

When researchers write academic journal abstracts, they need to meet the requirements of the publisher, which may very well mean that they need to be aware of “the meaning and functions of borders” within which their work is presented in this type of academic text. This paper reports on an investigation of the use of vague language (VL) and IMRaD moves (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion) showing the degree of informativeness of academic journal abstracts published in the “Bulletin of Transilvania University” of Braşov between 2010 and 2017. The areas of research these articles focus on range from linguistics and literature to business studies, medicine, and engineering. The analysis of the data, based on Cutting’s (2012) analytical framework, revealed that abstract authors use vague language (e.g.: “universal general nouns” and “research general nouns”) and that their abstracts mostly consist of introduction, method, and discussion moves. Results of similar research into the writing of article abstracts may be informative for both novice academic text writers and expert writers guiding their work.

Keywords

• vague language
• imrad moves
• degree of informativeness
• universal general nouns
• research general nouns