The transition from university to publication

Abstract

The ability to use the register and the rhetorical conventions of the research article is important to achieving academic success and professional development in researchers’ careers. Numerous studies have focused on research articles across different disciplines and cross-culturally. However, little research has been carried out into the students’ research report, from a developmental perspective and in a different language from English. To address this gap, we are reporting on a longitudinal study that aimed to characterize the transition of the academic register and the interactional function from university to scientific publication. The research focus is twofold: (1) it examines the academic register by means of lexical diversity, syntactic complexity and lexical density, and (2) it examines and compares the distribution of stance and engagement markers across stages. The data (N = 16) consists of university master’s theses written in Catalan (Romance language) and published articles in English, in the discipline of immunology, written by the same eight subjects. As discipline-specific writing conventions are an integral aspect of determining writing proficiency, overall findings suggest that students have not yet acquired writing proficiency, either in academic register or in writer-reader interactions.