Move analysis of Turkish research article abstracts: A comparative study

Abstracts are important parts of research articles in that they give the reader preliminary information about the article. In addition abstracts encourage the reader to read the article, and give clues about the conclusion of the article. Various rhetorical structures are employed in abstracts to fulfill these functions of providing information, encouraging the reader, and giving clues about the result of the study. These rhetorical structures in the abstracts of research articles written in different languages and fields are examined by linguists using various models. The current study aims to examine the rhetorical structure of the abstracts of research articles focusing on the moves used. For this purpose, the abstracts of a total of ninety research articles written in the last ten years in the fields of biology, measurement and evaluation in education, and linguistics were selected and examined. The similarities and differences among the abstracts, the reasons for the differences, if any, the organization of the move structures, and also, the move structures in the abstracts in terms of abstract length, move frequency, move pattern, and words per move and the tenses used in the moves have been analyzed. The abstracts examined in the thesis were selected from the articles scanned in Dergipark (ULAKBİM) and met the specified criteria -being single or double-authored and written in period of time from 2013 to 2023. Hyland's (2000) Five-Move Model was used to analyse the data obtained. Although there are some differences between the abstracts, it is concluded that the abstracts mostly share the basic rhetorical structures and include at least one of the moves in the model used.