Argumentation is an essential part of the research process and its linguistic representation. Argumentation, as well as the formation of appropriate wording requires that the author is familiar with different types of argumentation and the experience with their use to substantiate one's thoughts and statements in a proper scientific way. Until now, argumentation as an object of linguistic research in scientific has been widely researched, but in the context of scientific articles in Latvian, it has not been studied at all.
 This paper explores the possibilities of qualitative analysis of argumentation in order to develop a methodology for determining the presence of argumentation and further linguistic research on it (for example, classification of argumentation by strategy, structure, scope or expansion, etc.).
 To achieve the intended goal, 20 social science articles (published from 2016–2018) in Latvian have been selected from the fields of political science, economics and business, education, and sociology. These articles were structurally different, 8 articles strictly adhered to IMRaD format, 6 articles partially followed it (mainly the discussion section was missing) while the remaining 6 articles completely ignored the IMRaD format. The selection of articles was done to accept or reject the initial hypothesis that the proportion of argumentation is directly related to the IMRaD structure of the articles.
 To determine the argumentation, the same research methods that are used in computational linguistics are applied to qualitative research and manual text zone marking is used. The study was intended to obtain and test a universal methodological approach that could be used for future linguistic research in disciplines (mainly humanities and arts) where the IMRaD structure is not used.
Read full abstract