In the era of online searches and digital libraries, the importance of research article abstracts (RAAs) is perhaps unquestionable. As a result, cross-linguistic research, particularly in the field of corpus linguistics has received considerable attention as it explores how scholars introduce their studies in a convergent genre, namely abstract. A significant body of research has addressed the variation of abstracts in terms of content and structure across languages and disciplines. The current dissertation compares abstracts published in North American and Ecuadorian journals (NA&EJ), considering humanities and sciences. The corpus analysis consisted of 240 abstracts written in English: 120 in North American and 120 in Ecuadorian journals. Sentences were the unit of analysis. The top-down and bottom-up approaches identified the rhetorical moves and drew the boundaries between them. The English corpora went through software-driven text analysis. The L2 syntactic complexity analyzer (L2SCA) gauges the syntactic complexity while the Lextutor vocab-profile measures the lexical richness of abstracts. It used the SPSS statistical tool to analyze the output of the linguistic analyzers. Results showed an emergent rhetorical organization of eight moves with four recurrent moves in abstracts of NA&EJ. There was significant variability in the overall sentence complexity, amount of subordination, and degree of phrasal sophistication between NA&EJ. Notwithstanding, though there was variability in the means of syntactic complexity in NA&EJ abstracts, no statistical differences were found between fields and between the four syntactic dimensions across disciplines at the level of significance (α = .05). There were differences between the lexical density and lexical sophistication, but not in the proportion of lexical diversity. This study has shown that although abstracts in NA&EJ followed a similar rhetorical structure, the frequency of the moves varies across disciplinary fields. Even though abstracts in NA&EJ used extensive vocabulary and diverse types of sentence structure, resemblant linguistic outcomes and cohesive means emerged regardless of their publishing context and disciplines. This study affords valuable insights to investigate the recurrent rhetoric, lexical and syntactic structure used in abstracts. Ideally, research outcomes will uncover the actual use of language to discuss linguistic implications and provide pedagogical applications for academic writing.