A cross-disciplinary analysis of literature reviews in English dissertations

Abstract
As an indispensable part of theses and dissertation writings, a literature review introduces previous researches related to the current study and points out the research significance of the current study. Meanwhile, followed by the review writer’s own comment upon the reviewed studies, a literature review also reflects the perspective and ways of thinking adopted by the writer. The examination of the texts of literature reviews can also facilitate the investigation into the linguistic features of LRs. Therefore, text analysis of LR is an effective method to get a deep insight into the linguistic features of different genres. The dissertation is an effort to investigate into the disciplinary discrepancy between literature reviews of medical science and literature reviews of linguistics.
The study adopts a corpus-based method that is based on two different corpora. One corpus contains 30 literature reviews extracted from doctorial and master dissertations of medical science. The other is linguistic corpus that contains 30 literature reviews of linguistic doctorial and master dissertations.
By examining the texts of the samples with software, the study analyzes medical literature reviews and linguistic literature reviews from three perspectives: reporting verbs, modal verbs and transitions. By comparing literature reviews of the two disciplines, the study finds out the linguistic features of medical literature reviews and linguistic literature reviews, and summarizes the disciplinary differences between the two.
Keywords: literature review, cross-disciplinary analysis, linguistic feature
摘        要
不同学科的研究存在着不同的研究范式和逻辑思维，这些差异如何通过学术文本得以体现？这是本研究的目的。
文献综述，是指就某一时间内，作者针对某一专题，对大量原始研究论文中的数据、资料和主要观点进行归纳整理、分析提炼而写成的论文。综述专题性强，涉及范围较小，具有一定的深度和时间性，能反映出这一专题的历史背景、研究现状和发展趋势，表明了论文的作者对其所研究的领域的了解情况及其自身研究对于该领域的贡献,因此是学术论文中不可或缺的一个重要部分。然而，纵观迄今为止的学术论文研究领域，论文中及其重要的文献综述部分很少受到关注，尤其是英语学术论文文献综述的跨学科研究，更是少之又少。
本文采用语料库技术，以30篇语言学学术论文文献综述及30篇医学学术论文文献综述作为语料，从转述动词 、情态动词及关联词三个角度，对样本进行定量定性相结合的文本分析，通过对比分析，得出两类不同学科在综述前人研究时存在的差异，并归纳总结出各自的特点以及所反映出来的不同学科研究在研究方式和逻辑思维上存在的差异，以期对未来相关领域的研究提供借鉴参考意义。

关键词：文献综述，学科差异，语言特征