Making functional units functional: The role of rhetorical structure in use of scholarly journal articles

Scholars are reading more journal articles than ever, so it is important that they focus on the relevant text within the articles they read. To support this goal, this study explores enhancements to a journal reading system by applying the idea of the functional unit, the smallest information unit with a distinct function within four major components of scholarly journal articles—Introduction, Methods, Results and elevance theory Discussion. This study examined a set of functional units and their associations with scholarly journal articleuse tasks through literatureanalysis andvalidationsurveys. Forty-one typical functionalunitswere found in psychology journal articles, with varying relevance to five tasks requiring use of information in journal articles. The relationships among sets of functional units for particular tasks were also identified. A taxonomywasdeveloped incorporating the relationships between functional units and informationuse to inf nctio tasks, which can be used environment signalling fu