Unit 4- Final Task- Pachado- Quiroz

A Comparative Analysis of Four Research Article Abstracts

           

              Abstracts are the most important constituent parts of Research Articles. Hubbuch (1996) defines abstracts “as brief summaries of the major points made by an author in a book or article” (p.126). These pieces of writing are crucial tools seeing that they give a first impression of the article, helping readers to decide whether to continue reading them or not.  Correspondingly, the American Psychological Association (2007) argues that if an abstract is accurate, informative and comprehensible, it will make the document readable.  However, not all abstracts are structured in the same format; in this respect they follow the academic conventions in accordance with their field of study.

      Four research article abstracts which belong to two different fields of study, the medicine field and the educational field respectively, have been deeply analyzed and compared taking into consideration their main characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast these abstracts to enumerate and summarize their main similarities and differences.

            The abstracts of the two educational articles analyzed, one written by Aydin & Yildiz (2014) and the other written by Diez- Bedmar & Perez- Paredes (2012), have many features in common. To begin with, both of them are informative as they provide the reader with the main findings of the research. Furthermore, they are both organised in a clear, concise and neat manner. Swales and Feak (1994) state that “abstracts consist of a single paragraph containing from about four to ten full sentences”. In this respect, both abstracts offer a single unbroken paragraph comprising between seven and nine full sentences. Thus, both of them respect abstract length requirements.  Considering the linguistic features of abstracts outlined by Swales (1990) and Swales and Feak (1994) it could be said that not only do Aydin et al. (2014) and Diez-Bedmar et al. (2012) use the past tense but they also avoid abbreviations and jargon when writing their abstracts.

            Regarding the main differences between the abstracts of these two research articles, it could be affirmed that they vary in the use of impersonal passive voice, personal pronouns, and they also differentiate from each other as regards the usage of tenses. While Aydin et al. (2014) uses the impersonal passive, Diez-Bedmar et al. (2012) chooses the personal pronoun we to describe the research study.  For instance, “We investigated the type of feedback and the impact of English native –speakers’ feedback on Spanish peers’ discourse restructuring in the context of an online collaborative writing task involving tertiary level students of English and Spanish as foreign languages” (Diez- Bedmar et al., 2012, p.62). As for tenses usages, the opening sentences in both abstracts are written in the present. For example, as Aydin et al. claims “This study focuses on the use of wikis in collaborative writing projects in foreign language learning classrooms” (p.160). However, when describing results, it has been found that there is a tense variation in Aydin et al’s (2014) paragraph whereas Diez- Bedmar et al. (2012) prefers to keep the past tense. To illustrate this tense variation, Aydin et al. (2014) asserts “The results revealed that the argumentative task promoted more peer- corrections than the informative and decision- making tasks.” (p. 160). Similarly, in the same paragraph the authors claim “The results of the study also suggest that students paid more attention to meaning rather than form regardless of the task type.” (Aydin et al., 2014, p. 160).

            The abstracts which belong to the medical field share several similarities between them. To start with, the one written by Di Angelantonio, Chowdhury, Sarwar, Aspelund, [Danesh] & Gudnason (2010) and the other one written by Smith, Kerr, Fenner & Straker (2014) are informative abstracts, as they offer the reader the key results which were obtained during the research. For example, Di Angelantonio et al. (2010) argues “Compared with the reference group (estimated glomerular filtration rate 75-89 ml/min/1.73 m2 and no proteinuria); people with lower renal function within the normal range of glomerular filtration rate did not have significantly higher risk of coronary heart disease”. Likewise, Smith at el. expresses “Two clear themes emerged from the focus groups relating to (1) what adolescents liked or thought they wanted in a text message to support behavior change, and (2) how they experienced or responded to text messages”. What is more, both abstracts are divided into different paragraphs which contain the main parts of the research article to be developed. Each of the paragraphs is outlined with a heading at the beginning and they anticipate the reader what he or she is going to find in the research paper. In this sense, it could be affirmed that these two abstracts are structured abstracts since they both contain bolded headings and each heading identifies the main sections in the research study. All the paragraphs in both abstracts are concise, as well as clear and neat. Concerning the format of the two abstracts, although they contain the word abstracts as a title and their keywords are listed in bold, none of them are centered titles as required by APA conventions (2007). Similarly, neither of the writers of these two articles uses abbreviations or jargon language in their abstracts writing. Regarding tenses usage, these two abstracts share the similarity that in both of them the past tense is mostly used to express their result sections and the present tense is used in the methods and the conclusions sections, respectively. For instance, in the results section Di Angelantonio et al. (2010) affirms “Information on chronic kidney disease increased discrimination and reclassification indices for coronary heart disease when added to conventional risk factors (P<0.01)”. In the same way, Smith et al. (2014) argues “What adolescents said they wanted in text messages often conflicted with their actual experiences”. As regards the use of present tense in the methods and conclusion sections of the abstracts, Di Angelantonio et al. (2010) expresses “In people without manifest vascular disease, even the earliest stages of chronic kidney disease are associated with excess risk of subsequent coronary heart disease”. Equally, Smith et al. (2014) exposes “The conflicting views described in this study suggest that overweight and obese adolescents may not know or have the ability to articulate how they would best be supported with text messages during a healthy lifestyle maintenance phase”.

            Swales and Feak (1994) argue that there are two approaches to writing abstracts: the results-driven approach and the research paper summary approach. The former approach “concentrates on the research findings and what might be concluded from them” whereas the latter approach provides “one – or two – sentence synopses of each of the four sections.” (pp. 210-211). Accordingly, the two abstracts which belong to the medical field differ from each other because Di Angelantonio et al’s (2010) abstract puts emphasis on the results obtained during the research study. The paragraph which contains the results in this abstract is the longest paragraph and results are specifically described and explained by the authors. Quite the opposite, in Smith et al’s (2014) abstract each section synopses in a similar manner the main points of the research article to be developed by the authors.

            After analyzing and comparing the four abstracts which belong to the medicine and the educational field, it could be concluded that all of them present and explain the main arguments, the important results and the evidence obtained in the complete article. Despite the fact that many differences in language usage, structure and format could be perceived, those variations seem to be related to the discipline that the author belongs to and do not affect the abstracted work. Nonetheless, all the authors succeeded in including the mandatory components as well as making their documents readable by providing the reader with accurate, comprehensible and informative summaries of their completed work.    

References

           

            American Psychological Association (2007). Concise rules of APA style. Washington, DC: British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data.

             Aydin, Z. & Yildiz, S. (2014). Using wikis to promote collaborative EFL writing. Language Learning & Technology 18 (1), 160-180. Retrieved fromhttp://llt.msu.edu/issues/february 2014/aydinyildiz.pdf

              Di Angelantonio, E., Chowdhury, R., Sarwar, N., Aspelund, T., Danesh. J. & Gudnason, V. (2010). Chronic kidney disease and risk of major cardiovascular disease and non-vascular mortality: Prospective population based cohort study. BMJ (341), 1-7. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c4986.

              Diez- Bedmar, M. & Perez- Paredes, P. (2012). The types and effects of peer native speakers’ feedback on CMC. Language Learning & Technology 16 (1), 62-90. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/issues/february 2012/diezbedmarperezparedes.pdf

              Hubbuch, S.M. (1996). Writing research papers across the curriculum. (4^th ed.). Hartcourt Brace: Fort Worth, TX.

           Smith, K., Kerr, D., Fenner, A., & Straker, L. (2014) Adolescents Just Do Not Know What They Want: A Qualitative Study to Describe Obese Adolescents’ Experiences of Text Messaging to Support Behaviour Change Maintenance Post Intervention. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2014; 16(4):e103. DOI: 10.2196/jmir.3113.

             Swales, J.M (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. (Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

            Swales, J. M., & Feak, C.B. (1994).  Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.