The 48th AEDEAN conference (Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies) took place in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain on 12-14 November 2025, and GENCI members were invited to present their latest research on digital genres, hyper-connected genres, corpus studies, and collaborative networks:
Alberto Vela (University of Zaragoza)
Framing Trust: The Role of Evaluative Language in Online Fundraising. Today, digital crowdfunding platforms are allowing researchers to increasingly use digital resources to reach and engage diversified publics, making scientific contents accessible to everyone. One of the main aspects in the construction of any discourse, also the fundraising discourse, is the writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions they are dealing with, what was traditionally called evaluation or stance-taking (Gozdz-Roszkowski & Hunston, 2016, p. 133). Although the language of evaluation in digital genres has been studied in the recent years (e.g., Zou & Hyland, 2019; Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2022), to the best of my knowledge there are no research studies on the same in the digital genre represented by crowdfunding proposals and this is the gap this works seeks to cover. This presentation explores how evaluation in text contributes information relevant to understanding how writers convey evaluation and take a stance when crowdfunding scientific projects. Analysing evaluative language in crowdfunding proposals can be a helpful manner to understand how scientists use language in different ways to express their expert opinion of scientific research and build trust for their projects. Starting from the compilation and analysis of a 50-science project corpus from Experiment.com, evaluative stance expressions in this work were first identified through the extraction of ‘content words’ (Biber, 2004, p. 123) and then classified according to Biber’s taxonomy (2004) into the following stance categories: verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns. Subsequently, genre analysis and, more specifically, the framework of genre theory (Swales, 2004 and followers) was applied to identify the discourse functions of these evaluative words in each rhetorical section of the project proposals. Preliminary results show that the analyzed crowdfunding proposals are rich in stance verbs (52.65%) and to a lesser extent stance adjectives (23.52%), serving to express values of effort, improvement and diligence in the proposed projects as well as judgement in regard to experiments and Lab Notes updates, respectively. This can be useful for both theoretical advancement and pedagogical purposes, i.e. to apply scientists’ findings to digital communication teaching and learning.
Gonzalo Ruiz, (Kampal Data Solutions), Jose Divasón (Universidad de la Rioja) and Carmen Pérez-Llantada (University of Zaragoza)
Collaborative Networks and International Research Publication Practices: Metrics, Impact and Implications for Researchers’ Education and Training. In this paper we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, combining complex network theory (Álvarez et al. 2021, Zhou et al. 2018) with writing and composition studies (Andersen et al. 2014, Bazerman and Prior 2004), to discuss: i) the creation of collaborative research networks that leading researchers establish through international co-authorship practices, and ii) the relevance and impact of these networks within the researchers’ disciplinary communities. Building on such interdisciplinary approach, we used complex network analysis to construct the co-authorship networks of four leading EU researchers and identify the impact of their collaborative behaviour when writing in English for research publication purposes. We extended this analysis with quantitative (corpus-based) and analysis of the titles of their journal articles using data mining techniques and corpus tools, as the previous literature has also done (Anthony 2001, Chen and Liu 2023, Hyland and Zou 2022; Kerans et al. 2020).
The network analysis generated four distinct cases of collaboration clusters, from which we evaluated the extent to which the structural properties of the networks (degree centrality, betweenness and modularity) determine the researcher’s relevance and impact. Network #1 represents the case of a researcher whose collaboration cluster reveals many stable collaborations, predominantly with national groups, which have a significantly high impact. Network #2 illustrates the case of a researcher with a high number of publications shared with three other researchers. Other collaborations show a high degree of stability. Network #3 is an example of a researcher who collaborates with multiple communities, typically involving more than ten collaborators, many of whom are from the researcher’s own country. This network further illustrates the relevance of a collaborator with whom the researcher has published extensively, with a co-authoring publication rate of almost 50%. Finally, network #4 reveals the case of a collaborative network with around 11-12 clusters of around 5-10 collaborators who do not necessarily belong to the same institution or research group. These communities generally do not collaborate with each other in a consistent manner. Instead, the network identifies several researchers with high centrality, indicating the potential for collaboration among them and through them to connect with other research groups. Further linguistic analysis showed that the recurring grammatical structures in the titles of researchers’ articles were primarily complex noun phrases (NPs), in which information is elaborated upon. The result is a lexically dense, heavily nominalised discourse style with a high explicitness level. This style is characteristic of the information-dense register found in academic prose (Biber and Gray 2016). In light of these findings, we advocate a research-informed approach to raise awareness among researchers of the importance of collaborative authoring in today’s increasingly competitive research landscape. Finally, we propose some pedagogical tasks to help scientists write effective journal article titles. We conclude that network analysis is a valuable tool for identifying patterns of researchers’ collaborations by establishing connections across institutions and disciplines, forming collaborative clusters of researchers working on similar topics and identifying central researchers who facilitate collaboration between different research communities.
Oana María Carciu (University of Zaragoza)
Building a Corpus of a High Stakes Science Genre Network. The affordances of Internet technologies and the phenomenon of doing open science have facilitated the proliferation of genres that populate the ecosystem of research communication. For example, current digital genre research has shown that several add-on genres enhance the online journal article, aiming to increase the article impact by targeting more diversified audiences in the digital environment (Pérez-Llantada, 2021). These genres connect or network to form sets, chains, or ecologies (Spinuzzi, 2004). Corpora of genre networks are needed for empirical investigation of text linguistic features of these connected genres, as well as for understanding their core discourse features, namely intertextuality, remediation, re-entextualization, hybridization and embedding, resemiotization (PérezLlantada and Luzón, 2023). Building such specialized corpora that go beyond single genres, therefore, represents a relevant research focus for the study of research writing in the era of the digital transformation. This paper discusses critically the compilation of a corpus of a genre network for high stakes science communication, namely summaries to published research articles. The corpus of summaries to research articles includes highlights, plain language summaries, digests, and significance statements published in open access between 2019 and 2024. Findings evaluate and report on how representative the corpus is for the study of research writing across interconnected genres by applying the five-step framework for designing and evaluating language corpora proposed by Egbert, Biber and Gray’s (2022): establish linguistic research question(s); address the domain considerations; address the distribution considerations; collect the corpus; document and report corpus design and representativeness. In addition, preliminary results from a set of case studies conducted to gain insight into what appears to be typical of each genre in the network or discourse type are provided. Various types of challenges that may be encountered, particularly in the phase of addressing domain consideration, when creating a corpus of genre networks are discussed in the conclusion given their impact on the degree of representativeness of such a corpus.
Rosana Villares (University of Zaragoza)
Hyperlinks’ entextualisation and rhetorical functions in the online The Conversation’s Dissemination Articles. New communicative and rhetorical practices have emerged in response to Open Science demands, such as the need to make scientific research more transparent and with a clear social impact, and to make knowledge freely available to anyone as well as cognitively accessible to engage citizens in scientific research processes (Bartling and Friesike 2014; Dai et al. 2018; Loroño-Leturiondo and Davies 2018). As a result, scientists are expected to engage in public science dissemination initiatives. With the advent of digitalisation, however, the emergence of parascientific genres has facilitated the communication of scientific content to non-specialised and broad audiences by means of digital dissemination articles, social media posts, blog posts or videos, among others (Kelly and Miller 2016). Therefore, the main objective of the study is to analyse what type of hypertextual relations and what rhetorical functions are associated with hyperlinks in dissemination articles in order to understand how science is communicated on the Internet. A corpus of 30 dissemination articles was collected from the website The Conversation, where scientists can publish dissemination articles based on their current research. The corpus belonged to the “Science and Technology” section, published during 2021-2022 in English. A corpus-based discourse analysis approach was adopted. An initial corpus analysis was carried out on AntConc to extract frequency lists, n-grams, and KWIC in relation to the hyperlinks and their entextualisation. This was followed by a qualitative analysis of the hyperlinks’ contents and connected genres, their rhetorical functions, and their relevance in the readers’ knowledge-building construction processes (Maier and Engberg 2019). Results show that hyperlinks represented 6.77% of the whole article text, and often comprised 3 or 4-gram phrases. Hyperlinking to external websites was more frequent than internal hyperlinking to other The Conversation articles. The main genres hyperlinked to dissemination articles were high-stakes science genres, other parascientific genres, and journalistic genres. Other peripheral academic genres, such as author profiles, appeared to prove the authority and credibility of their claims. The main rhetorical functions of hyperlinks corresponded to sharing References: and information to support claims, providing the same information in a different format to enhance the transference of knowledge (e.g., image or video), and sharing additional resources and advice. According to Maier and Engberg’s framework (2019), peripheral knowledge expansion (e.g., author profiles, other The Conversation articles, news articles), and knowledge enhancement relying on evident knowledge (e.g., academic papers and similar academic genres) where the most frequent processes found in the corpus. It is expected that these findings can provide insights regarding science communication for professional training, showing how including hyperlinks can increase the message credibility and cater to the readers’ different needs and interests to communicate science to diversified audiences.