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Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Edited by Ute Römer-Barron, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 95] 2020
► pp. 307–332

Stand-alone literature reviews

A new multi-dimensional analysis

| Carnegie Mellon University

This chapter presents a new multi-dimensional analysis of stand-alone literature reviews (e.g., Annual Review of Medicine). Using the methods of Biber (1988), I analyzed 417 stand-alone literature reviews. A factor analysis of 72 grammatical features was conducted and a six-factor solution chosen. The dimensions were interpreted as Human vs. Technical/Academic Focus, Questioning/ Interpreting vs. Knowledge-Conferring, Expression of Stance, Author/Discourse Community vs. Topic Focus, Abstract vs. Concrete Focus, and Methodological Concerns vs. Description. Texts were then divided into four groups: discipline, time period, review type, and the presence or absence of methods. Factorial ANOVAs found significant differences for discipline and time period for many dimensions, whereas significant differences for presence of methods and review type were limited to one dimension each.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Statistical analyses
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Dimension 1: Human vs. technical/academic focus
    • 3.2Dimension 2: Questioning/interpreting vs. knowledge-conferring
    • 3.3Dimension 3: Expression of stance
    • 3.4Dimension 4: Author/discourse community vs. topic focus
    • 3.5Dimension 5: Abstract vs. concrete focus
    • 3.6Dimension 6: Methodological concerns vs. description
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.13wri
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