Abstract
The present research study has made a comparative analysis of the rhetorical structure and linguistic choices of 500 research article abstracts from the inner and outer circle countries. It has used Ant Mover software to tag the rhetorical moves in research article abstracts following Hyland’s (2004) five-move model while MAT v 1.3.2 was employed to highlight the linguistic features of these abstracts. It has identified the obligatory and optional moves in the research article abstracts. The data was taken from HEC recognized journals of Inner and Outer Circle countries published during five years (2016-2020). This research is quantitative in nature that has used the quantitative findings to highlight the comparative occurrence of different moves and linguistic features in the research article abstracts. It helps novice researchers to get them fully acquainted with the rhetorical structure of abstracts and thus assists them in following the generic structure of Research Article abstracts.