Needs and Niches: Comparing the related Background and Introduction sections of patents and research articles.
Résumé
Patents represent a critically important research genre in numerous scientific and technological fields, yet their rhetorical and other linguistic features remain underexplored relative to those of the related and much more extensively studied research article. While patents share many common elements with research articles, and sometimes even cover the exact same scientific discoveries as articles, they differ from articles in substantial ways, largely due to differences in their communicative purposes, their intended readerships, and the presence of significant legal constraints that govern many aspects of patent construction.
Here, I present a comparative analysis of a corpus containing pairs of U.S. patents and published research articles covering equivalent scientific discoveries in the area of biotechnology. For this analysis, I have focused on the “Background of the Invention” section of the patents and the Introduction section of the research articles. Research article Introductions are perhaps the most widely studied of all sections of IMRAD-type articles, often displaying a rhetorical structure as described by Swales’s CARS model (Swales, 1990, 2004). While the Background section of patents may address similar scientific elements as article Introductions and may thus be expected to include aspects of the CARS model, the two sections often show fundamentally differences, including with respect to their rhetorical structures, the way in which cited work is addressed, and hedging. These differences, and their functional relations to the divergent communicative purposes of each genre, will be addressed.