A Rhetorical Move Analysis of Graduate Thesis Abstracts in Field of Forest Economics

Abstracts must be carefully constructed since they lead readers to take up the full text of research. In Turkey, there have been some investigations on the rhetorical move analysis of the research article and thesis abstracts. Yet no study has dealt with the move analysis of forestry research. This study intended to make rhetorical move analysis of master and PhD thesis abstracts considering the effects of time and thesis type. The paper explored 197 thesis abstracts between 1987 and 2018. Text of thesis abstracts were coded by five-move model. The most frequent moves were purpose (P), methods (M) and results (R) while half of the theses omitted the introduction and discussion moves. In terms of allocated text space, results had the biggest share whereas discussion had the smallest share. The most frequent co-occurring moves were purpose, methods and product, while P-M-R was the most common move sequence. Results revealed the need for graduate institutes to offer a course on research/thesis writing especially for master students. Writing guide for thesis should clearly indicate the required information for abstracts based on the rhetorical moves