Functions of Reporting Verbs in the Result and Discussion Section of Research Articles over Sciences

The interaction between the writers and the experts while using citations is one of the main features of academic texts. For the integration of external experts into the text, writers usually use reporting verbs, which seem to function differently. Furthermore, selecting reporting verbs (RVs) by the researchers of disciplines seems to vary. This paper explored the functions of RVs across sciences. To this end, 200 “Results and Discussion” section of RAs from the four sciences, namely Life Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Health Sciences were gathered and used as the data, and their functions of RVs were analyzed based on Hyland’s framework (2002). Hyland (2002) considered three basic RV types based on their function, including research, cognitive, and discourse acts, subsequently dividing each category into several subcategories. The results showed that the writers in Life Sciences used more research acts in comparison to the other disciplines. In terms of cognition acts, the rates of tentative verbs were high in all sciences since the researchers tried to report the results with caution as they were uncertain about the findings. The results approved this claim, indicating the high frequency of tentative verbs under the category of discourse acts, across disciplines using verbs like hypothesize, indicate, and suggest to show doubt with different rates. The obtained results can guide novice writers of the above-mentioned four disciplines to advance an authorial perspective and adjust to the expert conventions of the relevant research areas.