Augmenting Meaning: A Comparative Analysis of Circumstantiation in Academic Abstracts Across Three Disciplines

Abstract

Within academic and scientific contexts, the genre of research article abstracts holds considerable importance, as these abstracts play a crucial role in influencing readers' decisions regarding the selection of articles. The current study aimed to formulate a clear view of the use of circumstances in research article abstracts across three disciplines: economics, engineering (electrical and electronic) and medicine (general and internal). The study analyzed a corpus of 360 research article abstracts (RAAs), comprising a total of 80,028 words, from twelve highly ranked open access academic journals within the three disciplines published within 2018–2019. To answer the research questions, computational linguistics analysis methods of text mining via the annotation and tagging of the circumstances used in these RAAs were employed using the Systemic Functional Linguistics software UAM CorpusTool. The analysis administered the SFL system for circumstances. Upon employing the nonparametric Kruskal Wallis test, the findings revealed a statistically significant variance in the employment of circumstances in RAAs (χ2(2) = 124.24, df:2, p < .001) between the fields of economics an medicine and between the fields of engineering and medicine. The findings of the current study analysis may present a clearer account of the contemporary approach to crafting an academic abstract, which may serve as a valuable resource for prospective authors within these specific disciplines and contribute to the knowledge base of scholars engaged in the realm of academic writing.