universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

109SCI Journal Citation Reports (Garfield, 1989b, 1989c) could be obtained, I had toamplify the range of my search to the 30 most cited journals in their respective fields, asdefined by the same citation reports.According to Nwogu (ibid.: 92), accessibility can also refer to the difficulty oreasiness with which the analyst approaches technical texts in other fields outside herown. To add mobility to the process of analysis, a non-specialist researcher can conducta study in specialized disciplines either by using help from specialist informants or byrelying on her intuitions and knowledge about how language works, limiting the analysisto intuitively observable linguistic features and their respective functions in the text.In the present study, a combined approach was adopted. Through the interviewswith specialist members of the discipline (Chapter 3), I obtained feedback about howBRs function within the different fields. At the same time, I relied on my intuitions andknowledge of how language works, focusing my analysis on those features empiricallyobservable in the data.4.1.2 Collecting the dataThe basic criteria for collecting the BRs for the analysis was comparability andconsistency between texts. All 180 texts were extracted from 1990 issues of journals thatconsistently carried at least two BRs per issue. The adoption of these criteria, however,restricted the number of journals that contributed with texts for the corpus in each area,i.e., not all journals served as sources for data and each area had a different number ofreviewing journals. Thus the data collection was restricted to eleven (11) linguistics