While the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format is common in scientific writing, it may not currently be as ubiquitous as often thought. We undertook a systematic, corpus-based study of primary section headings in research articles across a range of STEM disciplines to investigate adherence to the IMRAD structure in relation to type of study (computational, empirical, or theoretical) and field. We identified four categories of structure: IMRAD, IMRAD+ (IMRAD with additional sections and/or different order), Nested IMRAD (multi-part studies), and Non-IMRAD. Papers in biology mainly used an IMRAD format, while less than half in engineering or social sciences did so. While empirical papers tended to use IMRAD formats, most computational papers did not. Thus, our findings show that IMRAD is a common but not universal structure for contemporary scientific writing. Awareness of these differences should encourage teachers of scientific and technical writing and scholars of writing studies to pay closer attention to the actual structural forms used in different STEM disciplines and with different methodological types of research studies.

When writing journal articles, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) researchers produce a number of other genres such as grant proposals and conference posters, and their new articles routinely build directly on their own prior work. As a result, STEM authors often reuse material from their completed documents in producing new documents. While this practice, known as text recycling (or self-plagiarism), is a debated issue in publishing and research ethics, little is known about researchers’ beliefs about what constitutes appropriate practice. This article presents results of from an exploratory, survey-based study on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling among STEM “experts” (faculty researchers) and “novices” (graduate students and post docs). While expert and novice researchers are fairly consistent in distinguishing between text recycling and plagiarism, there is considerable disagreement about appropriate text recycling practice.

Review Article| January 01 2011 Introducing Students to College Writing: Moving Beyond Humanities-Centered Practices Cary Moskovitz Cary Moskovitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2011) 11 (1): 211–218. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-025 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Cary Moskovitz; Introducing Students to College Writing: Moving Beyond Humanities-Centered Practices. Pedagogy 1 January 2011; 11 (1): 211–218. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-025 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Professionals routinely ask colleagues for feedback on drafts of their written work, and the feedback they receive frequently includes suggestions for changes in wording. By convention, professionals are free to appropriate these suggestions without citation; the suggested words or phrases become, in effect, the author’s own in a transaction this essay terms a textual gift. In contrast, guidelines and policies on plagiarism for student writers are typically phrased in ways that would appear to forbid students from accepting textual gifts or to require that they use citation in doing so – both of which interfere with teaching students how to solicit and make use of feedback in a professional manner. Centered on a case from the author’s own experience, this essay explores the complexities of textual gifts in academic settings through a look at the language of institutional policies, handbooks on writing, and online guides to citation practices, as well as existing scholarship on plagiarism. The essay argues that new scholarship is needed to guide both instructors and institutions, and maps out some potential avenues for this work.

Despite the widespread acceptance of many kinds of nonliterary texts for first-year writing courses, primary scientific communication (PSC) remains largely absent. Objections to including PSC, especially that it is not rhetorically appropriate or sufficiently rich, do not hold. We argue for including PSC and give some practical suggestions for developing courses and designing assignments using PSC