PB2A

Ting Pan

Writing 2 / MW 3PM

04/19/2015

PB2A

Comparing Genres: “SCIgen” and a Scholarly Source

    In PB1B, we have explored the papers present in the SCIgen. As is known, these papers are non-academic and definitely distinguished from scholarly academic publications. In the school library, I find a scholarly academic publication, “The Free Software Alternative: Freeware, Open-source software, and Libraries.” Rhetorical features and conventions of this genre can be analyzed by comparing with papers generated by SCIgen. 

    First, the audience of scholarly academic publications are narrower than those of SCIgen. SCIgen is accessed to everyone on the Internet. However, because of the protection of copyrights, academic publications may not be copied or posted without the copyright holder's permission and less people can access them. For example, in online school library, if I do not log in, then I am unable to get so many academic works. On the other hand, each piece of academic publications focus on a specific topic, people who are interesting in this topic are more likely to read them instead of a large academic crowd. For this publication, the topic is “freeware and open-source software.” Maybe students or scholars of social science are more likely to read it.
   Secondly, the purpose of these two genres are quite different. SCIgen a computer program to randomly generate computer science research papers. It is just for amusement. But for scholarly academic publications, researchers write these papers to explore, interpret and evaluate sources related to the specific topic and offer their own perspective on the issue. Also, these works can attract more people to participate in the discussion about this topic. 

    Thirdly, the style of these them are distinct. We can notice that the fake academic papers in SCIgen use context-free grammar. For real academic publications, the grammar must be correct. Also, the tone of them is formal, unemotional, instructive and there are no ambiguities in language. 

   The content of academic publications is truthful. In SCIgen, all generated papers are entirely nonsense. However, all information gathered in scholarly academic publications must be based on facts. For example, “One cannot charge a fee for copies of the freeware save for distribution costs” mentioned in this publication is a truth. We can also observe that authoritative sources are listed at the end of this publication, which reveal that this publication is reliable.

   Scholarly academic publications should be well-organized and understandable. Like papers generated by SCIgen, this academic publication is arranged in order - abstract, introduction ... conclusion and lastly references. Even if in this publication, there are no figures. But for most scholarly academic publications, especially which related to science subjects, we can find many figures numbered consecutively and with caption.They are sometimes necessary to present results.

    Additionally, same as papers in SCIgen, scholarly academic publications are written in a mixture of present and past tenses. Researchers use present tense to report well accepted facts, like “The author retains sole possession of the copyright, so users cannot alter the software. ”; they use past tense to describe specific research process, such as “After much searching, I discovered the right tool—David Lord’s Ascii Chart. ” 

    Last but not least, peer review is a central aspect for most scholarly academic publishing. In academia peer review is often used to determine an academic work's suitability for publication. Other scholars in a field need to find a work sufficiently high in quality for publication. Meanwhile, since reviewers are usually very familiar with the sources used by the authors, another benefit of the peer review process is an indirect guard against plagiarism. Therefore, I think that peer review is the most important concept of scholarly genre, because it helps maintain standards of quality of scholarly publications and provide credibility.