A taxonomy of functional units for information use of scholarly journal articles

Abstract

Today's readers of scholarly literature want to read more in less time. With this in mind, this study applies the idea of the functional unit to the use of digital documents. A functional unit is the smallest information unit with a distinct function within the Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion components of scholarly journal articles. Through a review and analysis of the literature and validation through user surveys, this study identifies a set of common functional units and examines how they are related to different tasks requiring use of information in journal articles and how they are related to each other for a particular information use task. The findings, presented in the form of a taxonomy, suggest a close relationship between functional units and information use tasks, and furthermore among a set of functional units for a particular information use task. This taxonomy can be used in the design of an electronic journal reading system to support effective and efficient information use.

Studying disciplinary corpora to teach the craft of Discussion

“…The move and step concepts have had wide-reaching implications for the analysis and teaching of all RA component sections: Abstracts (Ayers, 2008;Lorés, 2004;Martín, 2003;Samraj, 2005), Methods (Chang & Kuo, 2011;Lim, 2006;Zhang, Kopak, Freund, & Rasmussen, 2011), Results (Brett, 1994;Bruce, 2008;Lim, 2010;Nwogu, 1997;Williams, 1999), and Discussion/Conclusions (Dudley- Evans, 1997;Yang & Allison, 2003). However, unlike the CARS model, demonstrated to be applicable across disciplines, work has stalled on the completion of teaching-oriented models validated with large corpora representative of multiple disciplines.…”

Linking information through function

“…Each card included two functional units, implying a relationship between the two in order to encourage the participants to think about the relationships this study aimed to identify and categorize. These functional units were derived from the task‐centered functional unit taxonomy constructed by Zhang (), in which functional units are in three categories: primarily related, other related, and additional related. For example, functional units associated with the task “learn about background” review previous research (primarily), point out the contribution of previous research, indicate a gap in previous research, narrow down topic, clarify definition (other), relate to prior/next experiments, justify methods, summarize results, provide established knowledge of topic, and compare results with previous research (additional; see ).…”

“…The seminal work in this regard is Swales' Create a Research Space model , p. 141), which was proposed for writing research article introductions in which the overall meaning of the introduction is realized through three moves, “establishing a territory,” “establishing a niche,” and “occupying a niche,” and each move is in turn realized through a set of steps. Based on Swales' model and other move‐analysis studies, Zhang () developed a taxonomy of functional units with 41 smallest independent information units with distinct functions occurring in a document, from a corpus of the journal research article genre in the psychology domain.…”

Identifying structural genre conventions across academic web documents for information use

“…For the entire survey, each participant was compensated with 50 RMB (approximately equal to 7 dollars) for completing the online surveys, each of which took approximately 30 minutes. Referencing the number of participants in Zhang's study (Zhang, 2011(Zhang, , 2012, 14 participants were recruited, nine female and five male, including five doctoral students, nine master students. All of them specialized in information management and library science.…”