a linguistic diagnostic analysis of english abstracts of msrt’s high ranking basic sciences journals and their correspondence to iso-214 standard

purpose: english abstracts are the only way through which non-speaking readers can access persian papers, the quality of english abstracts from the viewpoint of semantic and syntax should be controlled. adopting a linguistic framework, the present study sought to determine the linguistic and orthographic problems embedded in english abstracts of msrt’s high ranking basic sciences journals, aiming to determine the degree to which these abstracts corresponded to iso-214 standard for the compilation of abstracts. methodology: the design used was a descriptive-comparative one. twenty four msrt high ranking journals (220 english abstracts) of sciences comprised the sample data of the study extracted from a population of 44 msrt sciences journals. findings: the analysis revealed that there were 1439 errors (of 27 types) in the 220 abstracts analyzed. the error type “inappropriate use of definite article ‘the’” (198 cases, 13.75%) was the most frequent one whereas “spacing problems” (150 cases, 10.42%) and “punctuation problems” (124 cases, 8.61%) ranked second and third. further, the adherence of the english abstracts to iso-214 was found to be 74% (x=7.16, sd=1.34).