The main purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent there is a rhetorical variation (if there is any) between research article abstracts written by American academic writers and those written by Taiwanese, and Turkish academic writers in the area of social sciences. This study presents a contrastive analysis of 138 article abstracts (46 by American academic writers, 46 by Taiwanese academic writers, and 46 by Turkish academic writers) published in a refereed online journal ‘Social Behavior and Personality’. The purpose of the study was to ascertain whether these article abstracts, which focus on the same issue but written by authors from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and addressing audiences from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, employed the same rhetorical strategies to introduce their works. For this purpose, the generic structures of these texts were analyzed. The analysis follows the Swalesian approach. The article abstracts seem to share a number of important rhetorical strategies. It appears that these abstracts conform closely to the M2–M3–M4 arrangement. On the whole, the rhetorical strategies shared by the groups in this section of the research articles outweigh the rhetorical strategies not so commonly employed. However, the abstracts written by Turkish speaking academic and Taiwanese speaking academic writers tend to underline their contribution to the field of study much further. Discussions and implications related to the findings will be presented in detail.