In a collection of fifty related articles in molecular genetics, most had one introductory self-
referential sentence that had (1) a first person pronoun,(2) a present tense verb,(3) most
often report,(4) with a nominal complement, and (5) an adverbial referring deictically to the
present or the paper itself. A typical sentence of this type is:'In this paper we report the
finding of a novel mechanism of RNA processing'. These sentences mark each article's main
knowledge claim, the assertion that the authors do not attribute to anyone else and for which …