Writing Research Articles in English: Microbiology

Abstract

This paper reports on the analysis of the corpus of microbiology research articles in English by using move analysis (Swales, 2004). The objectives of this study are to identify moves and steps in each section of the articles and to propose the move pattern for research articles. One of the procedures is corpus compilation. The corpus consists of 60 research articles representing the top five journals in microbiology based on the journal impact factors. Move analysis was conducted. The preliminary results of the analysis provide the basis for constructing a coding protocol. The inter-coder reliability analysis indicated the satisfactory level of agreement between the five experts and the researcher, as assessed by Cohen's kappa and percentage. Based on the results of move analysis, a move pattern was proposed, featuring a set of 15 moves, typical sequence of moves found in the corpus, and the status of the moves as either conventional or ephemeral depending on their frequency of occurrence in the articles. This study provides guidelines for scientists in general and microbiologists in writing and understanding research articles in order to effectively follow and disseminate scientific discoveries and advancements.