NICHE ESTABLISHMENT STRATEGIES IN RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS AND INTRODUCTIONS: A COMPARISON BETWEEN JOURNALS INDEXED BY SCOPUS AND SINTA IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

Novice authors or postgraduate students often fail to show the novelty of
their research in their research article (henceforth RA) abstracts and/or
introductions. This study aims to compare how authors publishing in
Scopus-indexed and those publishing in Sinta-indexed journals in English
Language Teaching (henceforth ELT) in the way they establish a niche in
their RA abstracts and/or introductions. For this study, 40 RAs were taken
from Scopus-indexed journals and 40 from Sinta-indexed journals. A
qualitative content analysis method used to collect and assess the data. The
findings reveal that the majority of authors in the two sets of RAs address a
research niche in the introduction section and very few of them also address
it in the abstracts. From the five different niche establishment (henceforth
NE) strategies, the most often employed ones in Scopus-index journals are
Strategy 2 (insufficient research) and Strategy 5 (suggesting solution) while
in Sinta-indexed journals Strategy 2 (insufficient research) and Strategy 1
(a complete absence of research). This study provides useful information
about NE strategies in RA abstracts and/or introductions for novice authors
and postgraduate students to write an RA abstract and/or introduction
better.
Keywords: English Language Teaching; Scopus-index journals; Sinta
indexed journals; research article introduction; niche
establishment strategies