Writing the Social Science Research Article: A Corpus-Based Guide to Structure and Language is an essential resource for graduate students writing their first journal articles, for experienced researchers looking to sharpen their prose, for non-native English speakers seeking concrete guidance on disciplinary conventions, and for writing instructors seeking empirical grounding for the advice they give. It transforms academic writing instruction from an art learned by imitation and intuition into a craft informed by large-scale evidence—making the hidden architecture of the research article visible, navigable, and usable. Drawing on a purpose-built corpus of 3,335 social science research articles—over 2.2 million words— Writing the Social Science Research Article replaces the guesswork of academic writing with empirical evidence. Instead of prescribing rules or offering model paragraphs to imitate, Michael Barlow opens up a massive collection of published work and shows what successful writers actually do, section by section, sentence by sentence.

The results are striking. Introductions consume roughly a third of a typical paper and are six times more citation-dense than Results sections. Discussions are hedged almost twice as heavily as Results—not because writers lack confidence, but because interpretation carries greater uncertainty than reporting. The phrase "contributes to" appears in Conclusions roughly once every 200 words. Passive past participles show up in Methods approximately once every 45 words. These are not arbitrary rules; they are tendencies born from the accumulated choices of thousands of writers navigating the same rhetorical challenges you face.

Organized around the standard IMRDC structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion), each chapter identifies the rhetorical moves that define a section, provides the most common linguistic constructions used to accomplish those moves, and supplies frequency data so writers can calibrate their own choices against published norms. For example, the chapter on the Discussion shows how experienced writers weave together interpretation, comparison with prior literature, and acknowledgment of limitations using predictable hedging patterns.

Beyond individual sections, the book traces patterns that span the entire paper. Dedicated chapters examine how tense shifts across sections (past tense dominates Methods and Results; present tense returns in the Discussion), how citation density rises and falls to mark the paper's argumentative arc, and how hedging and boosting interact to control the strength of claims from Introduction through Conclusion. The final chapter synthesizes these threads, presenting the research article as a single macro-argument—a gap introduced, an instrument applied, evidence produced, interpretation offered, and a contribution claimed—and provides diagnostic tests writers can use to check whether their own papers hold together.

The book's approach is practical and writer-centered. Every frequency, pattern, and example sentence comes directly from the corpus. Rather than offering templates to fill in, the book encourages a three-stage process: conceptualize first—deciding what you want to say—then consult the corpus evidence to find constructions that fit your rhetorical purpose, and finally compose in your own voice using structures that serve your argument. The corpus provides a repertoire of options; your study determines which options to choose. This means the book works whether you are writing about educational policy, sociology, psychology, or any other social science discipline.

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