Research article writing is a demanding task for researchers. Especially for non-native speakers, writing research papers does not come naturally. Studies have revealed that research paper writing conventions are a major problem. Research articles have a high degree of conventionalization. They are largely conventional as regards organization and language. The structure and the formulaic expressions in the research articles serve specific communicative purposes. They can be regarded as a type of code. Knowing and mastering these codes is beneficial to engaging in the research community. In this exploratory study, we manually analyzed research articles in various disciplines, attempting to explore more interesting conventional features. We examined the formulaic expressions in research articles from alternative perspectives: tenses, voices and rhetoric devices. The goal of this study is to help non-native researchers, especially novice researchers, to raise awareness of and facilitate the writing of such conventional formulaic expressions, which are expected from professional researchers in their publications.