Engineering Research Articles Research Articles

Lexical Bundles in Chemical Engineering Research Articles: Focusing on Structures and Functions

Lexical Bundles in Chemical Engineering Research Articles: Focusing on Structures and Functions

Reviewing Complex Static-Dynamic Concepts of Spine Stability: Does the Spine Care Only to Be Stiff to Be Stable?

Background Changes in the load-displacement relationship in spine segments suggesting alterations in biomechanical stiffness may not yield significant clinical information. Changes in Spine stiffness may arise secondary to neuro-muscular adjustments in the para-spinal muscles and may not be associated with physical anatomical laxity or motion restrictions at segmental articulations. Segmental stiffness may vary dynamically at different zones within the range-of-motion, suggesting a non-linear load-displacement relationship during motion. There is no linear, mechanistic relationship between spine pain and biomechanical markers of spine instability. Objective To review diagnostic assessment approaches of spine instability based on palpatory techniques, end-of-range radiography and imaging in light of our current understanding of biomechanical spine stability. Method The Medline and PubMed databases were screened for primary medical and engineering research articles and reviews on spine stability. Information related to bio-mechanical concepts and clinical decision-making were extracted and synthesized. Spine stability was described in two classical forms, the structural (anatomical) and the functional (physiological), the implications of static and dynamic instability was described in terms of biomechanical and mathematical models used to understand etiology of non-specific back pain. Results Evidence supports the view that dynamic adaptations in the load-displacement relationship of the spine may be resistive or assistive, depending on task-specific movements. Diagnosis of instability is based on structural and functional integrity of the segments in a static or dynamic context. Conclusion Development of specific criteria to define clinical spine stability, compatible with system-based biomechanical concept of spine stiffness, is an ongoing topic in clinical and basic science research.

Macrostructures and rhetorical moves in energy engineering research articles written by Chinese expert writers

Primarily motivated by the pedagogical question whether it is feasible to incorporate non-native English-speaking subject specialists' support in China to address students' research article (RA) publication difficulties, this paper investigates the extent to which Chinese expert writers' RAs conform to the established conventions of international scientific communities in terms of macrostructure and rhetorical moves. The investigation uses a self-compiled corpus of representative energy engineering RAs published by authors on Elsevier’s 2016 list of “most cited Chinese researchers”. Results show that (i) 86% of the RAs choose the IM[RD]C macrostructure, although other variant forms of the standard IMRD structure are used; (ii) nine of the twelve moves identified are obligatory, with frequencies highly comparable to the results of previous research on science and engineering RAs; and (iii) most of the steps in the moves are optional or quasi-obligatory, indicating that the Chinese expert writers not only rigorously follow the established conventions of international scientific communities but also use rhetorical strategies flexibly. Therefore, they could justifiably play a role in addressing novice researcher writers' publication challenges. The findings also throw light on the disciplinary culture of research writing in energy engineering, which could be taken into consideration by EAP practitioners.

Funded and non-funded research literature in software engineering in relation to country determinants

Since funding acknowledgements started to be added to bibliographic database records, bibliometric analysis has been used made to identify funding patterns in research literature production. A study was made in which analysis of Software Engineering research articles metadata and the funding information, retrieved from funding acknowledgments, to identify literature production trends for funded and all papers and the impact of various country determinants on the production. The bibliometric research papers were harvested from Web of Science database. An analysis of 178,668 papers was made, among which there were 57,677 (32,3%) funded papers (37,3% in G9 countries). China was the most productive country in terms of funded and USA in all papers. GPD or GPD per capita were the most important determinants impacting Software Engineering research literature production.

Predictors of infant and young feeding practices among children 6-23 months old in Bennatsemayworeda, Ethiopia

Feeding practices of children under two years directly affect their nutritional status, impacting survival. Many observational studies showed that maternal knowledge of optimal child feeding practices is basic to keep health of a child. However, maternal knowledge, attitude and practices towards child feeding and associated factors of pastoralist children were not well documented in BennaTsemayWoreda, South Omo Zone, and Southern Ethiopia. Therefore, this study was designed to assess child feeding practices and associated factors among pastoralist children aged 6-23months in Benna Tsemay Woreda, South Omo Zone, and Southern Ethiopia. A community-based cross sectional study was conducted among 645 pastoralist children aged 6-23 months from February-March 2016. A stratified random sampling technique was used to select kebeles (smallest administrative unit) and children. Out of Journal of Nutritional Health & Food Engineering Research Article Open Access 32kebeles, six were randomly selected. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire, 24hour food recall and focus group discussions. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Quantitative data was analysed using SPSS for windows version 20.0. Qualitative data was analyzed based on thematic content analysis. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were conducted.

A VARBRUL Analysis on The Reporting Verb Propose in Electrical Engineering Research Articles

Choosing an appropriate reporting verb is not only a technique to report a claim but also a tool to imply the writer’s stance or attitude towards the claim. The manner in which the reporting verb is employed can reflect the writer’s underlying implication. By using a variationist framework, this study is an in-depth investigation on how reporting verbs are affected in Electrical engineering research articles, taking propose as a variation. With the assistance of VARBRUL program, 397 tokens from 160 Electrical research articles were analyzed. Past tenses of propose was selected as an application value. The results show that time periods that the articles are published and verb voices are two factors independent from the application value. Meanwhile, tense choice of the verb has a significant correlation with journal editions and verb types. In different journals, frequency of propose used in past tenses can vary, and a significant proportion of self-reporting propose is used in past tense. Regardless the limitation of sample size and verb types, the study is potential in analyzing reporting verb from the sociolinguistic approach in future.

Establishing a Territory in the Introductions of Engineering Research Articles Using a Problem-Solution Patterns Approach

Background: Swales's Create a Research Space (CaRS) is a popular model for writing research article (RA) introductions. CaRS prescribes three broad moves—establishing a territory, establishing a niche, and presenting the present work. This study assesses the applicability of a problem-solution patterns (PSP) approach to facilitate Move 1 in CaRS by analyzing RAs in materials science and engineering. Research questions: 1. Is structuring an RA introduction using problem-solution patterns a common approach in published RAs in materials science and engineering? 2. How does PSP facilitate the setting of boundaries between territory and niche in these RAs? Literature review: Variants of CaRS have been widely applied to study RA introductions. Even though the 2004 version of CaRS has been deemed effective in describing the structure of RA introductions in a number of disciplines, its prescription of Move 1 may not be easily operationalized in teaching engineering research writing. For problem- or application-based RAs, the territory can be established with PSP while preserving other CaRS moves. Methodology: This exploratory study employs a text analysis approach to assess 30 RA introductions from three materials science and engineering journals. Results and discussion: PSP is found in most RA introductions. By integrating PSP into CaRS, the proposed model can capture problem-solution cyclicity as a build-up move for territory and niche establishment. Conclusion: Because problem-solving is central to engineering research, RA introductions can be structured using naturally-occurring problem-solution patterns. PSP-CaRS may serve as an effective writing model for RA introductions in engineering-related fields.

The language of civil engineering research articles: A corpus-based approach

This paper describes a corpus-based investigation of the 8 million word Specialized Corpus of Civil Engineering Research Articles (SCCERA), developed at the University of Tokyo. A keyword analysis was first performed in order to identify words associated with civil engineering research articles and of potential pedagogic value. These were then compared with established external wordlists (the New General Service List and the New Academic Word List) to categorize keywords into those: (i) commonly occurring in general English; (ii) commonly occurring in academic English, and (iii) not occurring in either the NGSL or NAWL. Keywords in the 11 sub-disciplines of civil engineering displayed marked heterogeneity, raising questions about exactly how specialized a corpus needs to be in order to be of pedagogic value. In a separate ‘cluster analysis’, 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-word combinations were extracted in order to identify fixed expressions common to the field. These were found to typically belong to one of five categories: (i) cause and effect language; (ii) comparison and contrast language; (iii) language of quantification; (iv) deictic language; (v) language showing the writer's stance. The pedagogic implications of these findings are discussed.

Lexical Bundle Structures of Nuclear Science and Engineering Research Article

Lexical Bundle Structures of Nuclear Science and Engineering Research Article

On the Functional Approach to Absolute Constructions in Scientific Prose Style (With Special Reference to Engineering Research Articles)

On the Functional Approach to Absolute Constructions in Scientific Prose Style (With Special Reference to Engineering Research Articles)

Rhetorical Impact through Hedging Devices in the ‘Results and Discussion’ Part of a Civil Engineering Research Article

It is common knowledge that hedging devices as a rhetorical technique common in all persuasive writing are considerably important in scientific discourse, for they are tools which facilitate presenting claims or arguments in a polite, acceptable and respectful manner. In addition, they are discoursal resources available to a scientific writer’s propositions to express uncertainty, skepticism, and open-mindedness. Research articles are an important means of communication between different members of a discourse community, and will be convincing to a certain extent only when authors are able to employ rhetorical conventions, such as hedging devices, persuasively. However, hedging is a problematic aspect in EAP learning since rarely are the learners able to hedge their statements appropriately, engineering students not being an exception. Therefore, this article tends to linguistically analyze the function of rhetorical impact of using hedging devices in the results and discussion part of a civil engineering research article published in the Asian Journal of Civil Engineering (Building & Housing) to conclude that a greater and more systematic attention should be given to hedging devices considering their importance in EAP. The implication is that students, especially the Non Native English Speakers, be taught how to recognize and effectively use hedging devices in their writing as they do not seem to be familiar with hedges and therefore find it particularly difficult to hedge their statements appropriately. Keywords: hedging devices, discourse community, linguostylistic analysis, Civil Engineering Research Articles

The Structure of Method Section in Engineering Research Articles

Genre analysis is one of the common ways to analyse the rhetorical structure of a text. Previously, there aremany genre analysis and rhetorical organisation studies on research articles (RAs) from different disciplines.Some of them focused on the whole RAs and some of them focused on certain sections of the RAs. This studyattempts to identify the moves in the Method section of the Engineering RAs, and the most frequent verbs in themoves. The present study adopts a corpus-based analysis; 60 RAs from an Engineering discipline were retrievedfrom the Scopus websites. The Method section framework from Huang (2014) was adopted for the analysis. Thefindings suggest that there are crucial moves in the Method section of the Engineering RAs, which need to beadopted by the writers to enhance not only their discourse competency, but also to meet the readers’ expectationof the text readability.

On Nominalization, a Rhetorical Device in Academic Writing (with Special Attention to Electronic Engineering Research Articles)

On Nominalization, a Rhetorical Device in Academic Writing (with Special Attention to Electronic Engineering Research Articles)

Move analysis of research articles across five engineering fields: What they share and what they do not

While many genre researchers have examined the rhetorical structure of research articles in various disciplines, few have investigated the complete structure of articles for students in engineering, a discipline that includes a wide range of fields. Using Swales’ move framework (1990), this paper analyzes the rhetorical structure of 67 engineering research articles from five subdisciplines: structural engineering, environmental engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and computer science. Six engineering researchers participated in the study by coding texts of full-length papers into moves and steps. The study found that the abstract, introduction, and concluding sections and some of their moves were conventional across all subdisciplines. The finding of no common move patterns throughout the papers across the subdisciplines is explained by the differences in the nature of research in each field. There were, however, limited subdisciplinary similarities such as the use of Move 5, Step 2 observed in environmental, electrical, and chemical engineering. The study results provide practical pedagogical resources, a theoretical background to guide writing in an engineering school, and implications for collaboration with researchers in specialized fields.

Writers’ self-representation in academic writing: The case of computer engineering research articles by English versus Iranian writers

It is widely acknowledged that academic writing is not just about communicating an ideational content; it is also about the representation of self. The purpose of this study was to investigate the tendency of Iranian and American writers for self-representation which is realized by means of writers’ explicit (first person self-references) and implicit self (imperative forms and attitude markers) in computer engineering research articles. In this study, 40 published research articles written in English by Iranian and American academics were analyzed to determine the distribution of first person pronouns, imperative forms and attitude markers. We have also examined the semantic references of plural pronoun ‘we’ as inclusive or exclusive according to their functions. The results indicated that both groups presented themselves both explicitly and implicitly. In addition, in the light of the results, it is evident that Iranian writers utilized explicit 'self' more than American writers did, whereas American writers made use of implicit 'self' more than Iranian scholars.

Metadiscursive Distinction between Persian and English: An Analysis of Computer Engineering Research Articles

The study tried to discover disciplinary distinctions between Persian and English in the academic genre. The focus was on the use of metadiscourse in the discipline of computer engineering research articles across the two languages. The selected corpus was analyzed through the model suggested by Hyland and Tse (2004). The results demonstrated that the two languages are distinct in their use of metadiscourse in the discipline studied. It was found that Persian, unlike English, relied on interactive resources more. The disciplinary distinction indicates that Persian computer engineering provides more textual elements while English language values a reader responsible trend.

Interacting with the Reader: Politeness in Engineering Research Article Discussions

The writer’s strategy to combine the exposition of factual information with personal judgement and interaction with the reader has been analysed in a number of studies (Hunston, 1994; Hyland, 1998a, 1998b; Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Skelton, 1997). Myers’ studies (1989, 1992) on the pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles analyse politeness strategies in regularities of scientific style that are usually explained in terms of conventions. In the context of scientific communication, the researcher performs two basic tasks: presenting a claim and contradicting former theories or beliefs. Both actions could be interpreted as impolite behaviours and constitute what Brown and Levinson (1987) call face threatening acts (FTAs). In this study we explore the presence of face-redressive politeness strategies in the discussion sections of engineering research articles. The data are drawn from a corpus of 46 discussion sections in the fields of computing, telecommunications, nanotechnology and robotics.

Beyond mood and modality: epistemic modality markers as hedges in research articles. A cross-disciplinary study

In this paper a cross-disciplinary study of the use of epistemic markers as hedging rhetorical strategies in research articles in English is carried out. Based on computer readable data, and combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the article argues that the use of modal expressions can be better explained as reflecting the strategies of hedging used by writers for dealing with the social conditions involved in the event of publishing an article, which is addressed to different discourse communities. Three different disciplines (Marketing, Biology and Mechanical Engineering) belonging to the soft knowledge vs. hard knowledge discipline continuum are investigated here. Our analysis of hedging in these three different disciplines has revealed, not only that there are differences in the occurrence of hedges in the RAs selected, but also that these differences depend on the nature of the data used for the research in each discipline. Each discipline tries to fulfil social needs in different areas. The sociological features of each discipline may be shaping the discourse in their RAs differently. This is reflected in the varied presence of hedging devices in Marketing, Biology and Mechanical Engineering research articles.

Reading & writing

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Rhetorical strategies in engineering research articles and research theses: Advanced academic literacy and relations of power

Research articles and research theses constitute two key genres used by scientific communities for the dissemination and ratification of knowledge. Both genres are produced at advanced stages of individuals' enculturation in disciplinary communities present original research aim to persuade the academic community to accept new knowledge claims, and are the result of social negotiations between authors and disciplinary gatekeepers. However, despite their similarities, these two academic genres differ as regards the status of their authors in academic discourse communities and the power asymmetries between themselves and disciplinary gatekeepers. Awareness of these differences in relations of power and of the social forces behind the formation of genres, which are constituents of advanced academic literacy, defines the rhetorical strategies used by the authors of these two genres. This is revealed by a comparison of 17 research articles and nine samples of research theses from the fields of electronic and chemical engineering. The analysis of the texts focuses on the density and function of hedges and, in particular, discourse-based strategic hedges and of their personal or impersonal expression. The analysis indicates that students hedge more than expert authors and virtually wholly refrain from taking personal responsibility for their claims. Expert authors, on the other hand, hedge less than the students and often use personally attributed hedges. The comparison additionally indicates differences in the frequency of certain types of strategic hedges between RA authors and students.