International Journal of English Linguistics; Vol. 9, No. 4; 2019 ISSN 1923-869X E-ISSN 1923-8703 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 42 Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts in Linguistics and Literature: A Cross Disciplinary Study Ijaz Asghar Bhatti 1 , Sahar Mustafa 1 & Musarrat Azher 1 1 Department of English, University of Sargodha, Pakistan Correspondance: Dr. Musarrat Azher, Department of English, University of Sargodha, Pakistan. Email: musarratazher@gmail.com Received: February 18, 2019 Accepted: March 18, 2019 Online Published: June 12, 2019 doi:10.5539/ijel.v9n4p42 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v9n4p42 Abstract The importance of an abstract in a research article has turned the focus of linguistics on Genre analysis of abstract articles. Taking into consideration this immensely researched topic, this paper aims to investigate the macro and micro structures in the Linguistics and Literature Abstracts. In the previous researches, this very comparison is never addressed by the researches, hence the present research aims to fill this gap. The corpus contained 40 abstracts, 20 of linguistics and 20 of literature from International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature (IJALEL). The macro analysis was made according to the Create a Research Space (CARS) model by Swales (2004) and Ant mover software was used to analyze the corpus, while the micro analysis followed Swales and Feak (2009). The results showed that there is no significant difference between the linguistics and literature abstracts at the macro level while the differences lie at the micro level. This study will be beneficial for the novice researchers as it provides a framework of analyzing two interconnected disciplines. Keywords: genre analysis, research article abstracts, linguistics, literature 1. Introduction English language is the language of the world today and is used as lingua franca in all the fields including research and technology. The knowledge of English allows professionals and researchers “to get access to the latest information in their fields and to effectively communicate with their colleagues throughout the world”. (Yakhontova, 2003, p. 14). Various researches in the English language are published in the journals around the world and research articles (RA) have now become the centre of importance in academia. Through RAs, “people in the scientific community can keep up with the latest developments in their own fields and may build on the present research and make their own contributions to their fields” (Zhang & Zhang, 2014, p. 31). Further, in the research and academic writing, genre analysis holds significant importance. The genre was first introduced in the area of ESP in the 1980s (Marefat & Mohammadzadeh, 2013, p. 39). Here comes a question that what is genre? Swales (1990) was the one who gave an extensive definition of the genre after studying it in various aspects, according to him: “A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style” (p. 58). The genre is also very significant in discourse analysis and is one of the levels contributing to discourse analysis. At various times and in various areas of study, genre has been defined and used mainly as a classificatory tool, a way of sorting and organizing kinds of texts and other cultural objects (Othman, 2011, pp. 67–68). Flowerdew (2014) defines genre analysis as Genre Analysis is the study of situated linguistic behaviour in institutionalised academic or professional settings (p. 22). A lot of work has been done on the genre analysis of research articles. Swales (1981, 1990, 2002, 2004), Hyland (2000, 2005, 2009, 2013) Dudley Evans’s (1986, 1988), Bhatia (1993), Lores (2004), Santo (1996), Cross (2006) and many more researchers wrote on the genre analysis of research articles. There are certain moves which aid in the genre analysis and this process of applying moves on a text is called moves analysis. Move analysis is a helpful tool in genre studies since moves are semantic and functional units of texts, which can be identified