Comparative Study on Textual Space of Journal Articles’ Abstracts

Every publication of journal has its own in-house-style of writing, and therefore, it determines its specificity, including the specific textual space of abstract writing. An abstract of any journal article is considered the most important part of the whole article itself because it can lead the readers to foresee what the article is about. This paper attempts to explore the textual space of the abstracts of journal articles. It can also reveal the specificity of abstracts writing of different research journals. This study is comparative study, qualitative in nature, and content analysis. The abstracts used as the sample cover two journals: one is Ventura, the journal of economics, business, and accountancy, published by STIE Perbanas Surabaya and the other is Liceo Journal of Higher Education Research, published by Liceo de Cagayan University. They are analyzed using the textual space for exploring how the moves of the abstracts of the two journals are structured. The results show that there are both similarities and differences in these two journals. It can be concluded that a guide of composing the abstract is needed so that the abstracts can be in uniform.

Keywords - genre, genre analysis, move, textual space, discourse community