Challenges and innovations

Our most significant challenges were:

• Collecting Samples Reflecting Real Consumer Expectations: We needed to gather exemplary research articles (RAs) that met the expectations of actual consumers of scientific information, rather than to those of discourse analysts, who are not typically specialists in the fields discussed.
• Gathering Rhetorically and Stylistically Appealing RAs for Spanish Writers: We aimed to collect RAs that Spanish writers of English for research publication purposes could use as models and with which they could identify.
• Ensuring Comparable RAs Across English and Spanish: In many disciplines, scientific journals in Spanish had either nearly disappeared or were considered to be of much lower quality than those in English. This posed a challenge in collecting comparable RAs in both languages.

These challenges led to the following innovations:

• Expert Recommendations: The RAs in the two corpora were recommended by expert informants (i.e. Spanish post-doctoral researchers) from the five institutions participating in the project, rather than being selected by us as discourse analysts.
• Judgement by Informants: The assessment of the RA´s exemplarity in the two corpora was made by our informants, rather than by us.
• Comparability Judgements: Our informants assessed the comparability of the RA pairs based on the similarity of the two recommended RAs in terms of their overall research type, study type, and/or topic.

Corpora characteristics

For the first ENEIDA cross-cultural studies, we focused on empirical research articles (RAs). These were compiled in the chosen areas for two possible collections, or corpora, types, which were not mutually exclusive:

1. Exemplary Research Articles in English (EXEMPRAE).

• Empirical
• Published in an international scientific journal in the collaborator’s field
• In English
• Authored by researchers who were not necessarily native English speakers, but not limited to Spanish researchers (as they would be the focus of the research in Phase 3).

2. Exemplary Research Articles in English and Spanish (EXEMPRAES).

• Empirical
• Comparable pairs of research articles similar in terms of topic and type of study (e.g. experimental, descriptive, survey, comparative, longitudinal, case–control, etc.)
• One published in English in an international journal by an author or authors who were not necessarily native English speakers but not limited to Spanish researchers
• The other published in Spanish in a Spanish journal by another Spanish author(s) (NOT by the same author or group)
• Each article must have been originally published in either language (i.e., neither should be a translation of the other).

In both cases, the empirical research articles should:

• Have made a very favourable impression on the informants during a recent reading, primarily due to how the research is reported rather than the journal’s impact.
• Have been published in journals where the informants were considering publishing or had considered suitable for publishing their research in the past.
• Be as recent as possible (published in 2000 or later), although older articles might be recommended in some disciplines.
• Be explicitly recommended to us along with the references and the file containing the research article.

Compilation process

The procedure for compiling the corpora was as follows:

1. Invitation to Recommend Articles: All Spanish post-doctoral researchers from the preselected knowledge areas and affiliated with the five institutions participating in the project were invited to recommend research articles that met specific characteristic detailed in an enclosed document (see also Moreno, 2013 and in process).
2. Submission and Justification: We received 313 files containing research articles via email from a self-selected sample of 84 collaborators, who also filled in an online questionnaire to justify their recommendations and to provide contextual information about each recommended article.
3. Acknowledgement and Follow-Up: A thank-you letter was sent to all collaborators, including a link to an additional online questionnaire for those who wished to apply for a certificate of collaboration and to provide information about their socio-demographic profiles.
4. Certificate of Collaboration: A certificate of collaboration was sent to those collaborators who applied for it.
5. Database Creation: Each recommended research article was associated with relevant contextual information in a resulting database.
6. Screening: The recommended research articles were screened to ensure they complied with the specified characteristics.
7. Validation: Only those empirical research articles that met the specified characteristics were kept as valid for the research objectives.
8. Resulting collections: The sets of valid empirical research articles, one consisting of comparable articles in English and Spanish and the other of articles in English only, were termed the EXEMPRAES Corpora and the EXEMPRAE Corpus, respectively.

Participants and responsibilities

Results and discussion: the Eneida Corpora

The ENEIDA Corpora currently consist of two main collections: the Exemplary Empirical Research Articles in English (EXEMPRAE) Corpora, which include exemplary empirical research articles published in English, and the Exemplary Empirical Research Articles in English and Spanish (EXEMPRAES) comparable Corpora, which contain comparable research articles published in both English and Spanish.