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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
In recent years, research articles have attracted great attention ―not only because of the vast number ofarticles published annually, but also because of the need to help researchers and postgraduate studentssucceed in the construction of texts appropriate for submission to scientific journals‖ (Martinez, 2003:103-104). Interest has been placed on various aspects of research articles, especially on the part of abstract.An abstract, which is usually found at the beginning of research articles, reports, theses, anddissertations, is a highly condensed, factual summary of certain information that appears in great detail inthe full document. Swales (1990) puts it ,― title and abstract in published papers are at the same time bothfront matter and summary matter‖, for ―of those who read the title, only some will read the abstract, and ofthose who read the abstract only some will read the article itself‖. Thus, for the editors of academic journals,an abstract constitutes the evidence when judging whether an article should be accepted for publication;while for the readers, an abstract serves as a time-saving device by informing them about the main contentand the structure of the article, indicating in this way whether the full text deserves their further attention(Martinez, 2003).In Western countries, previous studies of research article abstracts focus on the scope of genre analysis,mainly from the angle of words, syntax, and other linguistic features (Graetz, 1985; Swales, 1990; Bhatia,1993) and some concern academic writing (Weil, 1963, Gilbson, 1993).Hasan, Martin and Ventola all propose their own approaches to the analysis of generic structure(Paltridge, 1995:503), of which the most influential one is Hasan‘s generic structural potential. Accordingto Hasan (1985:70), it is a necessary element to define the genre to which a text belongs, while the optionalelements give structural varieties to individual texts of a genre.Another influential research is conducted by Martin (2003), who has carried out a genre analysis of theresearch article abstracts written in English for international journals and those written in Spanish andpublished in Spanish journals in the fields of experimental social sciences.In China, according to the investigation into research articles (1990-2010) related to abstract studythrough computer search, we find that most of them written are for the sake of standardizing academicwriting, such as Standardization of abstracts in scientific papers (Gao, 2003), Liu (2003), based on thecorpus from a wide range of academic fields, analyzes structural elements of Chinese research paperabstracts and Yu (2001) gives a generic structural description of 15 English abstracts. Although differenttheoretical frameworks are carried out for the research of abstracts, namely, from the perspective ofelements analysis and Hasan‘s theory of generic structural potential, some similarities also can be found.First, they both carry out a descriptive and explanatory approach to their studies; second, they each identifythe optional and obligatory structural elements as well as the sequencing of the elements summarized fromtheir corpus.Apparently, it has great significance for these above-mentioned researches to facilitate the awarenessof the structural and linguistic features of abstracts. However most of the studies carried out just are limitedto a single language本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。