Rhetorical structure of systematic reviews published in dental journals: implications for teaching reading and writing in ESP courses

Abstract

Systematic reviews (SRs) are relevant for the dentistry community; however, a multidisciplinary literature review suggests that, to date, no linguistic study on the rhetorical structure of dental SRs in English has been carried out, a gap the present study hopes to partly fill. Integrating Swales’ and Bhatia’s models and the New Rhetoric approach to genre studies, we analyzed the rhetorical organization of 100 SRs in the field of dentistry. The results indicate that SRs follow a prototypical structure: Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion-Conclusion (IMRDC). It can be broken down into 18 moves, 14 of which could be considered obligatory. The template proposed could be a practical resource for oral health scholars, clinicians and students to not only raise genre-consciousness but also effectively write and publish SRs in international dentistry journals.