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This study investigates how the macrostructure patterns (MSPs) of research articles (RAs) are distributed across different disciplines. The investigation is based on the Elsevier OA CC-BY corpus consisting of 76,835 RAs from 26 disciplines coming from Health Sciences (HS), Social Sciences and Humanities (SH), Life Sciences (LS), and Physical Sciences and Engineering (PE). In this study, we identify 72 salient patterns and show that a higher ratio of functional headings is found in HS, LS, and PE than in SH, which can be attributed, in part, to different emphases with respect to the knowledge mode and knower mode (Maton, 2009). In addition, we explore the connection between specific MSPs and particular fields. We also detail the wide distribution of the I_M_R_D pattern; it appears in the top 10 pattern list for 21 out of the 26 disciplines, and is particularly frequent in medical journals. In sum: this large corpus-based study provides a comprehensive picture of how MSPs vary across RAs from different disciplines and fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors’ use of questions in terms of both their forms and functions. The corpus used in this study consists of 15 small-class lectures from three academic divisions: Humanities & Arts (HA), Social Sciences & Education (SS) and Physical Sciences & Engineering (PS). These data are a subset of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Previous studies on academic spoken English have reported that, compared with other contextual factors, the disciplinary culture seems to exert a more critical influence on the use of various linguistic features. However, the results of this study show far more similarities than differences across different disciplines. Based on the major findings pertaining to the use of question forms and functions across the three divisions, it is suggested that for questions in academic lectures at the tertiary level, the influence of genre seems to outweigh that of disciplinary culture. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper seeks to extend the recent sociological work on the discourse and interpretative practices of the physical sciences by studying an area of social science and by examining health economics, in which the production of knowledge is linked closely to its practical application. The underlying idea behind the present text is that it should provide some analysis of health economists' definitional work, while at the same time representing health economists actively engaged in negotiating with the analysts about the nature of both parties' definitions.