ABSTRACT
All the genres in this chapter are research reports and thus similar to research articles. Reasons for the differences between them become clearer when the audience and purpose of each are considered. Theses and dissertations contain all the same components are thus are like extended research articles, with a longer literature review and often incorporating enough material for several articles, as well as other supporting material that may never be published. Research proposals share many features with the Introduction and Methods of a research article, but frequently contain additional components of budget and timeframe to show you can successfully conduct the research. Conference papers are essentially short research articles, often with a shorter Introduction and frequently incomplete Results and Discussion. They may have several audiences, including the reviewers, the audience, and perhaps judges of a graduate paper competition, all of whom have different criteria that need to be considered. Some engineers may write for industrial journals, which have a structure like research articles but take a more practical approach, with less emphasis on alternative methods or frameworks that could have been used.
