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The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level

Student Papers (MICUSP)

Article in Journal of English for Academic Purposes · September 2010

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeap.2010.04.002

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2 authors:

Ute Römer John M. Swales

Georgia State University University of Michigan
46 PUBLICATIONS 375 CITATIONS 144 PUBLICATIONS 6,035 CITATIONS

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Retrieved on: 21 September 2016
 Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9 (2010) 249
www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap

The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)

Ute Römer*, John M. Swales
English Language Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2028, USA

In late 2009 the Corpus Research Group at the University of Michigan’s English Language Institute launched on
the web the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). MICUSP Simple, the search and browse
interface to the corpus, provides free and immediate access (without need to register) to 829 A-graded papers written
by University of Michigan students in their final undergraduate year or in their first three years of graduate educa-
tiondhence the label “Upper-level.” The papers have been drawn from 16 disciplines across the four academic
divisions of the university, and represent a wide range of text-types or genres. The total number of words stored in the
electronic database is around 2.6 million. The URL for the current version of MICUSP is http://search-micusp.
elicorpora.info/simple. The MICUSP project website is at http://micusp.elicorpora.info.
MICUSP has been designed with a range of users in mind, including corpus linguists, scholars in disciplinary
variation, writing instructors, those concerned with English for Academic Purposes, and graduate and undergraduate
students, both native speakers of English and speakers of English as an Additional Language. The MICUSP Simple
interface features interactive graphs, user-friendly navigation, automatic results update in response to user selection,
and full paper view. Initial responses from around the world have been very positive. A number of internal research
projects are already under way, one investigating student use of ‘scare quotes’, the other whether students accompany
a sentence-initial “This” with a noun phrase or not. On the basis of the successful Michigan Corpus of Academic
Spoken English (MICASE, see http://micase.elicorpora.info), launched in 2001, we expect MICUSP to be adopted
externally for a range of teaching and research purposes, not excluding its use as a source of data for doctoral
dissertations.
MICUSP has been five years in the making. The original research design was put together by Professor John Swales
and Dr Rita Simpson-Vlach in 2004. Then Dr Annelie Ädel spearheaded the project; subsequently Dr Ute Römer and
Dr Matthew Brook O’Donnell have brought the project to successful completion, aided by considerable numbers of
part-time research assistants and interns. The projected next stages of the project will be an enhancement of MICUSP
Simple with additional features, and the release of an offline version of the corpus, accompanied by a handbook.
Please direct inquiries about the MICUSP project to elicorpora@umich.edu

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: uroemer@umich.edu (U. Römer), jmswales@umich.edu (J. M. Swales).

1475-1585/$ - see front matter

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2010.04.002