Convincing peers of the value of one’s research: A genre analysis of rhetorical promotion in academic texts

• We examine rhetorical promotion in English and Spanish research article introductions.
• Within related subdisciplines the English texts are rhetorically the most promotional.
• Cultural factors thus tend to override the influence of subdisciplinary context.
• The Health Sciences texts in both languages are more promotional than those of Humanities/Social Sciences.
• When comparing broad fields, disciplinary conventions seem to prevail over national cultural factors.

Intercultural studies have shown the existence of rhetorical variation in the prevalent discourse practices of multilingual scholars and those of English-speaking scholars. In this paper, we examine comparatively the typical rhetorical practices used in the Introduction section of 80 research articles written in English and 80 in Spanish in four disciplines in the fields of Health Sciences and Humanities/Social Sciences. We particularly examine how writers present their research studies in Move 3 (Swales, 2004), with a special focus on those steps that add promotional value to one’s research. The results revealed that, within the same field, the English texts present a higher degree of rhetorical promotion than the Spanish texts in each of the disciplines analysed. However, when comparing the two broad fields, the Spanish texts in Health Sciences present a higher degree of promotion than the English (and Spanish) texts in Humanities/Social Sciences. This indicates that, in shaping the promotional features of the (sub)genre in question, when professional and national cultural variables interact simultaneously, cultural factors tend to override the influence of disciplinary context. However, when broad fields of knowledge are compared, it is the disciplinary conventions in specific professional subcultures that seem to prevail over national cultural factors.