Academic Vocabulary Distribution in Applied Linguistics Journal Research Articles: Do SINTA Rankings Matter?

Background: As a national database for indexing scientific journals, SINTA has considerable significance for the Indonesian academic community as it measures the performance of national journals and increases the visibility of Indonesian journals and researchers internationally. Although studies have been conducted to examine the role of academic vocabulary in scholarly publications, very little has investigated how academic vocabulary has been used in SINTA-indexed applied linguistics journals (SIALJ) research articles and whether there are differences in academic vocabulary coverage across SINTA rankings. Purpose: This study examines the academic vocabulary measure of whether significant differences in academic vocabulary coverage are present in SIALJ research articles across rankings. This examination will offer insights into the linguistic expectations set by the editorial boards of the journals across rankings. Method: Out of 8585 journals indexed by SINTA, we found 72 related to applied linguistics. We chose four journals with the highest impact factor in each ranking to ensure representativeness. We included approximately 250000 running words from each journal in each ranking and obtained 6073379 tokens in total. We used AntWordProfiler to analyse the lexical distribution with GSL and AWL as the base lists. Results: We found that the academic vocabulary coverage in SIALJ research articles accounts for 11.01%, similar to other studies that also found that academic words typically cover at least 10% of academic texts. We also identified that the higher the journal rank, the more coverage of the academic vocabulary. However, our quantitative measurement identified no significant differences in academic vocabulary coverage in SIALJ research articles. Conclusion: The absence of significant distribution disparities across rankings suggests a shared practice of strategies language use in SIALJ, irrespective of their rankings and challenges common assumptions about strategic language use discrepancies among journal clusters.