‘An International Journal Publishing High Quality, Original Research’: Self-Evaluative Categories in Journal Descriptions

Journal descriptions “play an indispensable role” (Tse & Hyland 2010: 1880) in the process of knowledge dissemination and it is reasonable to assume (as claimed by Kidd 2002) that their wording and content has a real impact on prospective authors. Few attempts, however, have been made to follow up Hyland and Tse’s pioneering work (2009) on the genre, whose analysis described the macrostructural/interpersonal functions of evaluation. The present study explores the semantic categories (i.e. values) embedded in the lexis of self-evaluation. For this purpose, a corpus mirroring that employed by Hyland and Tse was assembled from 80 leading journals in linguistics, sociology, biology and mechanical engineering. It was then analysed using a combination of concordancer data and manual investigation of occurrences. The results suggest that, despite sharing a set of common values (e.g. globalism, worth, novelty), the four subcorpora differ in the degree of lexical prominence afforded to each variable. Thus the desirable qualities foregrounded by editors are instrumental not only to a journal’s status but also to the specific disciplinary culture it embodies.