Research Article Acknowledgements Across Disciplines: Patterns of Scholarly Communication and Tradition

In this paper we analyse the generic structure of acknowledgements in four disciplines: Biology, Robotics, Education, and Art history. The study is based on a self-compiled corpus of acknowledgements and employs the rhetorical move/step structure analysis to investigate disciplinary trends of expressing gratitude in research articles. The results show that in hard sciences acknowledgements are more frequent than in soft fields. In addition, scholars in Robotics, Biology and Education frequently express gratitude for various types of resources provided, whereas researchers in Art history rely on academic assistance in the form of feedback on manuscripts and discussions. The most vivid and least formulaic expressions of gratitude are observed in research articles written by scholars in Art history. Overall, the study reveals certain distinct disciplinary practices in expressing gratitude and confirms the importance of acknowledgements in EAP/ESP fields. It also points towards the need to reconsider the communicative purpose(s) of acknowledgement texts.