An Analysis of Disciplinary Variation in the Structure of Research Article Introductions

This paper presents an analysis of research article introductions from two disciplines in the field of Computer Science and Technology, i.e. Computer Information Security and Computer Languages, using Swales' (1990) Create-A-Research-Space (CARS) model. The results of the analysis indicate that there is disciplinary variation in the structure of this genre, which has important implications on pedagogy. The results also show that although the CARS model adequately describes the main framework of the introductions, a greater degree of embedding is needed in this model to account for the structures found in the introductions analyzed. Based on the results of the analysis, a modified version of the CARS model is presented in the concluding section.