Promotional strategies in research article introductions: an interlinguistic and cross-disciplinary genre analysis

Abstract

Publishing research unavoidably involves an adequate use of promotional strategies in order to meet the expectations of the members of particular scientific communities, which may vary both across cultures and disciplines. In this paper, we examine comparatively the presence of rhetorical promotion in the Introduction section of 80 research articles written in English and Spanish in the two related subdisciplines of Clinical and Health Psychology, and Dermatology. The results revealed that, overall, the English texts present a higher degree of rhetorical promotion in both fields, although some degree of cross-disciplinary variation was also found. This indicates that, in shaping the promotional features of the genre, when professional and national cultural factors interact simultaneously, cultural factors tend to override the influence of disciplinary context.