Evaluation in research article abstracts in the narrative and hard sciences

Abstract

Conventional wisdom on abstracts has it - and is strongly supported by the guidelines provided by international abstracting standards [American National Standards for Writing Abstracts (1979) New York: American Standards Institute] as well as guidebooks on academic writing- that the abstract only provides the main points of a study as briefly, concisely and ‘objectively’ as possible. Yet abstracts may include a surprising number of evaluative speech acts. Such evaluations may take place not only implicitly, in metaphoric terms, as e.g. Hunston [Hunston, S. (1993). Evaluation and ideology in scientific writing. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Register analysis: theory and practice. London: Pinter, 57–73] has shown in her study of evaluation in research articles, but also more explicitly, as realizations of personal judgements by means of attitudinal lexis and modal constructions. This article reports on a study of evaluation in research article abstracts across disciplines. The results of the study revealed differences in the manifestation, number and type of explicit evaluations in the abstracts belonging to different disciplines in the field of the humanities, social and natural sciences. The abstracts also revealed differences in the rhetorical structure of abstracts, in particular, in the human sciences. Such interdisciplinary differences need to be taken into account when teaching abstract writing to students entering the academic discourse community.

Introduction

The objectivity of scientific and scholarly writing has been challenged for two decades now by, for example, Bazerman (1984: 163–165), Myers, 1989, Myers, 1990, Hunston, 1993, Hunston, 1994. Furthermore, the prevalence of evaluation in all human discourse has been addressed by the Russian linguists Arutjunova, 1984, Arutjunova, 1988, Volosinov, 1929/1973/1986. Similarly, the Finnish scholars, Heikkinen et al. (1999), while discussing narrative research, have pointed out how ‘it is possible for research to produce an authentic view of the reality but no objective truth’ [my translation]. Although it is commonly thought that narratives are encountered in the humanities and some discourses pertaining to social sciences, the term ‘narrative science’ is not, however, confined to these disciplines only but such discourses can also be encountered in the natural or hard sciences. Moreover, some disciplines traditionally regarded as humanistic subscribe to the reporting patterns of experimental research, that is, what is conventionally regarded as the hard sciences. This is often the case in, for example, various branches of linguistics. It seems that the dichotomy of soft and hard sciences is rather fluid and as such insignificant, and it might be better to resort to Myers's glossing of scientific writing as ‘the narrative of science or the narrative of argumentation’ (Myers, 1990: 141–142).

Hunston (1993: 57; following Kress & Hodge, 1979, Fairclough, 1988, Martin, 1986) points out that ‘the ideology within which a text is written constrains choices in discourse organization, grammar and lexis’. Thus, if we are concerned with particular genres specific to academic or institutional discourse communities, we shall have to obey their rules as regards, for example, evaluation in academic texts. Hunston (1993: 58) defines evaluation ‘as anything which indicates the writer's attitude to the value of an entity in the text’. These attitudes are usually expressed as personal judgements couched in attitudinal lexis. The value system of the academic/scientific discourse community is thought to prefer impersonal discourse with no explicit evaluation (see also Mauranen, 2002: 116); hence, according to Hunston (1993: 58), evaluations may be performed in non-personal, that is, metaphoric terms (in Halliday, 1985 terminology) and expressed implicitly with non-human actors. Rather than going into descriptive details and elaborations of the following kind: ‘I gained these results in my study and on the strength of my data I suggest that…’, Hunston offers an example of ‘These results suggest that…’, in which ‘these results’ encapsulate all the human effort gone into the research.

Hunston distinguishes three categories through which evaluation is implicitly manifested in the reporting of research. These are status, value and relevance (Hunston, 1993: 60) Status, firstly, reflects the writer's degree of certainty and commitment towards the proposition and is always present and constantly evaluated in research writing. The evaluation of status takes place through the writer's different commitment expressed, for instance, in terms of known–unknown, certain–uncertain, probable–unlikely.

The second of Hunston's categories, value, denotes quality on the good-bad scale. We operate in the value system of ‘good research’, which means that even if the markers of attitudinal lexis (attributes such as good and successful) are missing, the writers’ attitudes to the value of their research are clear. Research articles often posit hypotheses whose value is then evaluated according to whether the hypotheses are supported or not (Hunston, 1993: 63). The evaluation of value usually takes place through lexis expressing accuracy, consistency, verity, simplicity, usefulness, reliability or importance, which renders the other language items traditionally regarded as evaluative redundant.

The third category is called relevance, which refers to evaluation of the degree of significance or relevance of the argument in a research article. Hunston defines Relevance Markers as metadiscursive clauses with a discourse-organizing function. These clauses thus ‘summarize the preceding or subsequent text and indicate its significance or relevance to the argument of the discourse and to the scientific community’ (Hunston, 1993: 65).

My assumption is that research article abstracts are evaluative per se, since they summarize research articles which are persuasive, and therefore, evaluative, as convincingly shown by Hunston. Hunston argues that implicit evaluation is the typical type of evaluation in research articles. The purpose of this study is, however, to discover whether research article abstracts also contain more explicit evaluation, that is, attitudinal language, in addition to implicit evaluation. By attitudinal language I mean explicit evaluation—in Hunston's terms: value, and also modality—in Hunston's terms: status. I regard status as a sub-category of evaluation in the same way as, for example, Thompson and Hunston (2000: 5) do.