Abstract Research article abstracts play a significant role in our globalised scientific world, where findings are disseminated in English. This study aims to identify and analyse the rhetorical patterns which characterise English abstracts in Sociology, a discipline traditionally dominated by Anglophone writers. Three corpora will be explored and contrasted: abstracts written in English as L1, in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and English abstracts translated from Spanish. Thirty texts will be analysed in each case. Features such as the frequency of moves and phraseology indicating rhetorical structure may illustrate the general level of hybridity that academic texts in English show internationally and can be interpreted as “innovative patterns of use”, as described in ELF literature (Jenkins, Cogo, & Dewey, 2011).