Academic Values in Context

This paper illustrates the methods employed in a recent study of academic writing based on a 1 million-word corpus of English research articles from ten different disciplinary areas (anthropology, biology, computer science, economics, engineering, history, mathematics, medicine, physics and sociology). Starting from candidate items with 100+ wordlist occurrences, the most frequent value-marking categories were investigated using a combination of automated and manual techniques; four of these categories (relevance, size, novelty and goodness) were then singled out for systematic investigation, based on lexical sets and word groups including synonyms and antonyms from different parts of speech. The results show how scholars from different disciplines draw on a repertoire of conventional, largely unqualified, axiological meanings instrumental to the production of knowledge claims in their field.