A Corpus-Driven Study of Terms Used to Refer to Articles and Methods in Research Abstracts in the Fields of Economics, Education, English Literature, Nursing, and Political Science

Abstract

The present study attempts to identify the most frequent terms that are used in research abstracts relating to research articles designations, research methods, and research goals and quantify them in various disciplines, namely, economics, education, English literature, nursing, and political science to see whether there is a unique pattern characterizing terms peculiar to each of the five disciplines under investigation. It also explains why specific terms are overused/ underused by researchers. The current study follows a corpus-driven approach. For this purpose, we compiled a corpus of 2500 research abstracts from online refereed journals in the fields mentioned above. The corpus linguistic software program, AntConc (3.5.8), was used to analyze the collected data. The analysis revealed that some terms are more frequently used in some areas than others. For example, the term 'study' was the most common word to designate academic research. The most frequent term to refer to population and subject-related terms was 'sample/s,' while the least frequent was 'interviewee/s.' The words used to designate tools or instruments varied, with 'test' being the most frequent and 'checklist/s' the least. This study is of significant benefit for researchers in various disciplines. It acquaints them with terms used to designate articles in their respective fields, in addition to terms used most frequently to refer to sample- related terms and finally to words used for setting goals such as objectives, aims, and goals. This, in turn, can help researchers and graduate students embarking on writing their theses to opt for the most relevant terms peculiar to their disciplines. Unlike most studies that focused on developing academic word lists (AWL), this study set off with terms previously established and used in research bodies and research abstracts to unveil their popularity and the extent to which they are used in various discipline abstracts.

Received: 20 January 2021 / Accepted: 30 March 2021 / Published: 10 May 2021