Activity: Choosing a Model Article and Compiling a Corpus
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This task is intended to help you build a collection of texts that are strong representatives of your discipline and research topic. These sample research articles will be used as writing models throughout the research writing process to help you develop your own manuscript. The discipline-specific corpus should contain no less than 10 articles relevant to your area of study so that you have a variety of writing styles from which to learn.
Compile your research articles corpus according to the following criteria:
- Choose from the three highly regarded journals you selected and justified for the “Selecting a Journal” activity and the journal where you will submit your final manuscript, if they are different.
- Published within the last five years (This may not always be possible, but try your best to find recent publications because writing conventions change over time.).
- Written by different authors
- Contain separate Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion/Conclusion sections or equivalent sections
- Are full peer-reviewed journal articles
You may want to ask your writing mentors to holistically evaluate the quality of the papers you select based on the quality of writing, the quality of research done, and the quality of visual presentation (e.g., figures, tables, graphs). They may identify papers that are relatively poor in terms of one or more of these criteria, so you will have to replace them with articles that would be better models of writing in your discipline. You may ask your mentors to recommend research articles, the quality of which they think is very good or excellent. It is important that you have good models of empirical research writing to grasp the expectations of your field.
You may find that as you go along, your “primary” article may change for various reasons. For example, you may realize that the article you chose is not representative of the writing style you are trying to achieve or perhaps the article is a good model for an Introduction but not for a Methods.
