This part of this monograph describes how cohesive chains of reference are typically organized in the ten RAs. The research articles in the corpus were very similar in their organization. Independently of the length of the article, the following sections could be identified:

The boundaries of these Sections were indicated in the Excel worksheets used for analysis by highlighting the first row of each Section. Furthermore, a dividing vertical line was drawn in front of the first referring item in each Section. This way, the new and extended cohesive chains became visible and the number of merges and splits in the chains could be counted for each section.