Towards a Cognitive Model of a Research Paper

This paper presents the results of a pilot study into the cognitive modeling of a research paper based on mental operations employed in the introduction section. Normally research paper introductions follow a particular organizational pattern reflecting the basic mental actions being materialized through a series of moves and steps. Drawing research material from introductions to four research papers generated by English-speaking authors and published in highly ranked international journals, this study considers verbal representations of mental operations involved in the generation of the scientific texts as well as their sequence. The study demonstrates the possibility of constructing a model of a scientific text based on its intelligent structure, which allows measuring the degree of the representation of categories that signal various intelligent operations reflected in a scientific text as a tool to express certain meanings. This model can be further applied in teaching academic writing to assess scientific texts generated by second language students.