IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v13y2019i2p555-563.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The rhetorical structure of science? A multidisciplinary analysis of article headings

Author

Listed:
  • Thelwall, Mike

Abstract

An effective structure helps an article to convey its core message. The optimal structure depends on the information to be conveyed and the expectations of the audience. In the current increasingly interdisciplinary era, structural norms can be confusing to the authors, reviewers and audiences of scientific articles. Despite this, no prior study has attempted to assess variations in the structure of academic papers across all disciplines. This article reports on the headings commonly used by over 1 million research articles from the PubMed Central Open Access collection, spanning 22 broad categories covering all academia and 172 out of 176 narrow categories. The results suggest that no headings are close to ubiquitous in any broad field and that there are substantial differences in the extent to which most headings are used. In the humanities, headings may be avoided altogether. Researchers should therefore be aware of unfamiliar structures that are nevertheless legitimate when reading, writing and reviewing articles.

Suggested Citation

  • Thelwall, Mike, 2019. "The rhetorical structure of science? A multidisciplinary analysis of article headings," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 555-563.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:13:y:2019:i:2:p:555-563
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2019.03.002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157718304942
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2019.03.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dangzhi Zhao & Andreas Strotmann, 2020. "Deep and narrow impact: introducing location filtered citation counting," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(1), pages 503-517, January.
    2. Mike Thelwall & Marcus Munafò & Amalia Mas-Bleda & Emma Stuart & Meiko Makita & Verena Weigert & Chris Keene & Nushrat Khan & Katie Drax & Kayvan Kousha, 2020. "Is useful research data usually shared? An investigation of genome-wide association study summary statistics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(2), pages 1-11, February.
    3. Dangzhi Zhao & Andreas Strotmann, 2020. "Telescopic and panoramic views of library and information science research 2011–2018: a comparison of four weighting schemes for author co-citation analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 255-270, July.
    4. Kai Li & Chenyue Jiao, 2022. "The data paper as a sociolinguistic epistemic object: A content analysis on the rhetorical moves used in data paper abstracts," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(6), pages 834-846, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:13:y:2019:i:2:p:555-563. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.