Abstract
Novelty is a concept of great importance in the writing of a research paper, given that the author has to persuade the audience of the news value of the reported research, which makes it worth publishing. In this paper I use a corpus of computer science papers to investigate how novelty is created in this discipline. I analyse how the author uses evaluation and lexical cohesion to integrate his/her research into the existing knowledge structure of the field. Evaluation in computer science papers is closely associated with the Problem-Solution pattern which structures most of the papers: authors claim that the technology they introduce is the best solution to a problem that they have previously identified. Lexical cohesion highlights the novelty of the research by establishing a semantic relation of contrast between the fragment of text reporting previous research in the field and that reporting the authors' own research.
Highlights
Sociologists of science and researchers on scientific discourse nave demonstrated that scientific knowledge is socially constructed by means of language and that scientific texts are notthe objective report of findings, but rhetorical products whose aim is to persuade the readers of the validity of the claims made there
The scientific journal is the instrument used by scientists to promote their work, which makes it evolve towards promotional genres. This seems to be specially true of computer science papers, used by the authors to introduce new models and new technologies and to show the advantages of this technology over that currently available
This paper has revealed the devices used by writers of computer science papers to construct novelty, to show that their work is a new and valuable contribution to the field which solves the problems that previous work could not solve
Summary
Sociologists of science and researchers on scientific discourse nave demonstrated that scientific knowledge is socially constructed by means of language and that scientific texts are notthe objective report of findings, but rhetorical products whose aim is to persuade the readers (i.e. the scientific conununity) of the validity of the claims made there (see KnorrCetina, 1981; Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Yearley, 1981). The second move is Establishing a niche ("definition of the needs of the market"), where the author claims that the existing knowledge in a particular field must be modified in some way (usually by asserting that it is inadequate and should be increased). This move, which usually provides a negative evaluation of previous research (see section 2.2), is realised by counter-claiming, by indicating a gap or inconsistency in previous knowledge, by raising questions and pinpointing problems or by continuing and adding to a tradition.
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