Two-folded messages behind CFP: A cross disciplinary study

Much research on analysing generic structure and linguistic features in academic settings mainly focuses on a single genre, but the structures of inter-related genres have been relatively less systematically studied. ‘Call for papers’ (CFP), as one of the ignitions in a genre chain of academic texts, could play a rather crucial role in affecting prospective contributors’ attention and also determining the quality of submissions. However, compared to the studies on research papers, studying textures of CFP has received relatively little attention from analysts. Thus, in this study 120 CFP were collected from various academic conferences in six disciplines on the Internet, and were compared to examine whether any disciplinary variations existed in terms of the unique schematic structure and lexical features of this genre employed by writers in both the hard and soft sciences. A manual multi-level move analysis and computerised analysis of textual elements were used. Subtle variations in CFP were identified between the two major science areas.