Introductions in research articles: variations across disciplines

This paper reports on an analysis of research article introductions from two related fields, Wildlife Behavior and Conservation Biology, using Swales' [Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] Create-A-Research-Space (CARS) model. The results of the analysis reveal disciplinary variation in the structure of this genre, which has important pedagogical implications. The Conservation Biology introductions fulfill a greater promotional function than the Wildlife Behavior introductions through the use of steps such as centrality claims. These introductions also tend to justify the research being reported in terms of real world matters rather than the epistemic world of research, in contrast to the Wildlife Behavior introductions. The results also indicate that a greater degree of embedding is needed in the CARS model to account for the structures found in the introductions analyzed. A modified version of the CARS model based on the results is presented in the concluding section.