Understanding news & views articles: Rhetorical structures across different disciplines

Article reviews play a pivotal role in fostering students’ critical evaluation and critical thinking skills. News & Views (N&V) articles published in Nature journals are one prominent example of article reviews and serve as excellent models for students to learn and refine their skills in writing article reviews. However, there is limited research on the rhetorical features of N&V articles, especially in terms of textual organization across different disciplines. To address this gap, three corpora were compiled for the present study, representing the disciplinary groups of natural sciences (NS), social sciences (SS), and technology and engineering (TE). Each corpus was comprised of 30 N&V texts from its respective disciplinary group. Using a self-developed coding framework building on previous research, we coded the move and step of each text in the corpora. The coding data were compared and analyzed to uncover the distinguishing textual features of the three disciplinary groups. The analysis revealed that the variations were predominantly at the step level. N&V articles of NS and SS shared most of the moves and steps, but N&Vs in TE exhibited unique stylistic characteristics. These findings hold significant implications for training and teaching article review writing, particularly in relation to disciplinary contexts.