Between “hidden” features of academic literacy and social assumptions of the genre research article within authors’guidelines of computer science journals

This paper presents the analysis of texts of Authors´ Guidelines of six Computer Science journals. The research aimed at verifying the existence of “hidden” features of academic literacy in the texts, which may hide relevant information to the production of papers according to what is expected by the journals. Through a discursive ethnographic analysis, which enabled us to understand the concepts of language, text and genre that grounds the literacy practices of the journals, some “hidden” features were identified and related to social assumptions of the genre research article. The analysis showed, among other things, that the journals center the guidelines, mostly, in formal and structural aspects of the text, failing to approach some literacy features, such as content, rhetoric and ideology. Based on a concept of language, text and genre, which is very similar to the Academic Socialization approach to teaching writing, identified by Lea and Street (1998), the journals depart from the social assumption that academic discourse specificities are the same for all academic genres. Thus, they count on some type of knowledge from the authors, which inexperienced researchers may not have yet, making it more difficult for these novices to engage in academic discussion in their field.