Genre-Based Analysis and Interactional Metadiscourse Analysis of the Unstructured Abstracts for Research Articles in Scopus-Indexed Q1 Journals: Experimental Abstracts on COVID-19

Abstracts serve as a crucial medium of providing readers with succinct information extracted from research articles (RAs), and assisting academic authors in publicizing their research to the clinical and health science discourse community. However, the rhetorical move structure and the interactional metadiscourse categories (IMCs) of RA abstracts on the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), one of the most threatening diseases in clinical and health science fields, remain underexplored. This study sought to investigate the move structure and the IMCs used in each move of the English RA abstracts on COVID-19. A corpus of 143 experimental unstructured abstracts was purposively compiled from international journals included in the Scopus database. The target journals were indexed in Quartile 1, as reported by Scimago Journal & Country Rank website in 2022. The coding scheme for the move analysis was adapted from those of Hyland (2000) plus Kanoksilapatham (2013), while the coding scheme for the IMC analysis was adapted from Hyland’s (2005a) interpersonalmodel. The findings revealed that the Result Move was often required while the Background, Methods, and Discussion Moves were conventionally used. The Purpose Move was found to be merely optional in the abstracts. Furthermore, the predominant IMCs discovered in each move of the experimental abstract genre may imply its own inherent nature, that is, how the authors exhibited their position and interaction. Taken together, the current study has important pedagogical implications for designing and developing guidelines for writing unstructured abstracts of experimental RAs.