roya goodarzi

The importance of "publish or perish" in academic contexts, especially for faculties and graduate students, is an undeniable problem because of its role in determining university achievement around the world. To deal with such problems, academic writers must be fluent in language repertoires (e.g., lexical bundles), which are an essential component of scholarly writing and necessary for creating publishable research articles (RAs).

Hence, the present study reviews 85 empirical RAs that have been done to extract highly frequent 4-word lexical bundles (LBs) published between 2008 and 2021 in ISI and Scopus-indexed journals across various hard sciences disciplines including medical sciences. Additionally, it offers a list of the general academic four-word LBs in the various sections of hard sciences RAs that can be used as a reference list of general LBs for scholarly writing in hard sciences.

The review revealed that in each discipline, the experts use discipline-specific bundles. The findings also revealed that academic writing structurally relies heavily on phrasal bundles and functionally on referential bundles.

The current study concludes that it is essential to explore disciplinary linguistic features such as LBs in academic writing to enhance academic success and RA literacy. The results may also be useful in developing appropriate educational materials and activities on LBs for academic writing in hard sciences such as medical sciences.

Citation is an essential prevalent feature of all academic writings in various fields of knowledge. It is employed by authors and researchers across disciplines for diverse reasons. This study was aimed at comparing types and functions of citations in medical research articles in discussion sections between Iranian medical faculty members and their native counterparts.
To this end, discussion sections of 48 native and non-native written Research Articles (RAs) from credible ISI-indexed journals with good impact factor (about 0.5-1.5) from each group were analyzed in terms of citation types and functions.
The results revealed that non-integral citations were found to be the most frequent citation type both among RAs written by non-native and native researchers. Also, Vancouver referencing style in non-native articles was used more while in native articles APA referencing style was the dominant style. Concerning citation functions, referencing was the most common one in native articles. However, referencing and comparisons were the most two frequent functions among non-native articles. As the results revealed, there were striking differences in citation practices of native and non-native researchers in medical sciences.
This study calls for reevaluation of citation practices among Iranian authors and systematic treatment of types and functions of citations in ESM and EAP writing courses.