Academic Discourse & Genre

By this point, I have seen various academic journals from various professional in my field. They all seem to have a similar format. The one in IEEE Access is no different.

Jimmie. "Lab Report" 3/28/2009 via flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

1. How many different kinds of genres seem to be published in this particular issue of the journal you selected?
From the looks of it and after making careful calculations, there only appears to be one type of genre present in the issue of the academic journal, IEEE Access.

2. Significant formal differences
This is somewhat tricky. For the most part I see almost the exact same genre which, I am going to title technical report. However, upon a more detailed inspection, I noticed that there are some minor differences.

These differences are rather small and I do not think that they should be classified as two separate genres, but as sub-divisions of the technical report genre. I will call these sub divisions a conceptual technical report and a data-intensive technical report.

The overall structure is the same. They both began with an abstract and an introduction and end with a conclusion\discussion and references. They both have various figures to help with understanding as well and they both essentially have a results section. This is were things somewhat change.

In the data-intensive technical report, the result second is full of numbers, calculations, and how those calculations were acquired. In the conceptual technical report, this section is mostly theories and explanations to back up their initial claims.

3. Definition of Genre
Technical Report: A publication based on results or derivations of theories from an experiment strictly used to convey its results. It is divided into five major sections: abstract, introduction, results, conclusion/discussion, and references.The intended audience are individuals with in the field of study that the experiment was conducted in.

This genre can also be sub divided into two smaller sections; a conceptual technical report and a data-intensive technical report. The main difference between these is the type of results that are being reported in results section.