Ideally, abstracts should already contain the 5-6 central themes (locations, participants, methods, and concepts) precisely and clearly expressed. Expert writers give a detailed introduction of the participants of the research, the research methodology (instruments, key questions, and concepts), the setting, and the research procedures as early as possible in the Abstract or Introduction. This is helpful in establishing a firm foundation for the structure of the rest of the research paper. Students familiar with the RCA analysis could check what this means in an RA of their choice as a home assignment: if each student in a group analyzes a different RA, the group can test how much it is true for research articles that the concepts represented in the longest reference chains are already presented in the Abstract. Vague signposting (reference to chapters or sections) in MA theses was a frequent problem. No doubt, it is difficult for students to organize their intended message sentence by sentence, as Coulthard (1994) put it, “knowledge is not linear, but text is” (ibid., 7). Expert writers are more attentive of the overall structure and turn their attention more to global patterns than student writers who are more likely to focus on sentence structures (Benson & Heidish, 1995). For this reason, in preparation for the writing up of long assignments, students benefit from writing up the list of contents as early as possible, before actually starting the process of writing. In addition, the organization of the structure of research papers may be improved by adding section titles or section numbers to vague reference items, as apparently, students often fail to check cross-references to different parts of their papers before handing in the final versions of their assignments.

Students need special training in writing up the Literature Review section. This is neither new nor surprising. However, what we have learned from the analysis of the reference structure of RAs is that apparently expert writers focus more on the methods and results of a piece of research than the actual process and details of conducting it. In contrast, novice writers place their focus on the authors of previous studies, which is reflected in their use of more third person singular pronouns in their review of the literature. Experts used neutral singular pronouns, demonstratives and third person plural pronouns. A part of training students to focus on research methods, participants and findings is to ask students to collect pieces of research they have read in a chart with all the relevant information they might need so that they more easily shift focus to methods and findings (e.g., authors, publication data, participants, methods, main findings, etc.). Besides the obvious advantages of such lists, teachers can also emphasize that it is the content of these studies that students should focus on in the text; it is less frequent EAP than in Hungarian studies that the authors receive special emphasis and appear in the flow of the text. In EAP, it happens mainly in the case of major, trendsetting authors or groundbreaking studies. This shift in focus can be made using the chart of studies that we mentioned above.

Expert writers present their Findings in logically related statements, where each finding is supported by results from the research process. Novice writers tend to rely more on the previous text; the greater the number of extended references they use, the more demands they place on the reader. Statements about research findings are more efficient if the reader does not need to rely on the previous text; this way, it is also easier to translate findings into the background of subsequent pieces of research (statements become more “citeable”).

In the Summary or Conclusions sections, experts tend to relate their findings more than novice writers to other pieces of research; they make more effort to contextualize their findings. This was also reflected in the reference structure: RAs have more self-contained sentences, and they make fewer references to the previous text. For novice writers, it is stressed that conclusions should come from their research results, but they tend to relate them to their own studies only. These pedagogical implications are based on a corpus of empirical research papers written in the field of applied linguistics. Therefore, transferring these findings to other contexts and other types of research papers needs to be done with caution and may require further research.