There is an increasing need for knowledge from the field of information and communications technologies (ICT) research to analyze a variety of problems across the social sciences. However, studies on research writing in ICT remain limited, in part because of this field's strong interdisciplinary nature. This paper examines the genre of research articles in the field of ICT, using 16 research articles. The study-collaboratively conducted by an applied linguist and an ICT expert-is largely based on Swales' (1990) move analysis, move coding, and investigation of the expressions of important rhetorical functions. The results show that although the examined articles do not appear to use any structure unique to this discipline, they draw from a limited range of common structures depending on the research type. The articles employ language that explicitly emphasizes the significance of the research, policy recommendations, and future work. We argue that ICT research article writing does not use any specialized interdisciplinary rhetorical structure, but focuses on communicating findings to a wider audience of readers from different disciplines. This paper also discusses pedagogical implications for ICT writing and interdisciplinary writing in general.
The purpose of this corpus-based lexical study is to identify the word frequency and text coverage of the 570 word families in Coxhead's Academic Word List in nursing research articles. A 608,918-word corpus called the Nursing Corpus was created for the study. The corpus contains 126 English nursing research articles from international nursing journals. The results show that the AWL covers 10.49% of the corpus, which implies the AWL word forms account for a high percentage of nursing vocabulary. However, the findings indicate that AWL coverage varies across different subject areas within the nursing field by as much as 8.92% to 13.55%. Moreover, the study identifies only 385 (67.54%) AWL word forms which are frequently used in the nursing corpus. The results also show that some academic words are used with different meanings and collocation patterns from those used in other disciplines. Thus, it is suggested that it is necessary to develop a field-specific academic word list that better reflects the nursing domain.