A Study of Cohesion in Persian Abstracts of ISC Top Journals Based on Halliday-Hasan Cohesion Theory

In present study, considering the importance and role of the abstracts of scientific papers and the importance of its storage and retrieval in information retrieval systems, one of the linguistic problems of abstracts, namely, cohesion, in particular the syntactic cohesion is studied.

504 Abstracts of ISC Top journals from the seven major subject areas of science were studied based on Halliday-Hasan (1976) cohesion theory by content analysis method.

The most frequent cohesive devices used in the abstracts of the papers of ISC top journals are reference, conjunction, ellipsis and substitution. In addition, in the abstracts of basic sciences and humanities, more than other 5 areas of knowledge, cohesive devices have been used, and medicine has benefited from the least degree of cohesion. From other findings, is suggesting the addition of linguistic rules of cohesion to the ISO 214-1976 guidelines for abstracts.

Due to the small number of cohesive devices, some of the abstracts of top journal papers have less readability and comprehension. To increase readability of the abstracts, the use of cohesive devices is recommended.