Rhetorical move structure of applied linguistics research abstracts across Sinta journal rankings

The scholarly publishing scene is familiar with databases where scholars can look up for journal list and rankings. The said rankings lead to the assumption that research articles from higher-ranking journals have better quality than those from lower-ranking journals. This study aims to see the correlation between journal rankings and publication quality by analyzing the rhetorical moves of abstracts from journals across Science and Technology Index (SINTA) rankings. This study utilized Hyland’s five-move model as the framework to analyze 40 research abstracts from two groups, SINTA 1 and SINTA 4 applied linguistics research abstracts. The analysis revealed that the abstracts from both journals exhibited similar usage of moves, where Introduction, Methodology and Product has high number of occurrences across the data. However, the dominant rhetorical structure pattern of the abstracts differs between the two groups. To conclude, while SINTA rankings do not affect the realization of the moves, it seems to impact the rhetorical structure of the abstracts to a degree. This implies that journals across different SINTA indexes may apply different criteria for the research articles they publish.