The norm for abstracts of research articles (RAs) is important and will win the RAs more chances of being received. The analysis of how abstracts are written in papers published in well-recognized international journals can serve as a reference to help writers conform to the norm. This paper, adopting Hyland’s classification and Santos’ framework, employing a corpus-based method, compares how native and Chinese writers use lexical chunks differently in abstracts from a perspective of move analysis. The results show that Chinese writers tend to use more lexical chunks; there is no significant difference in the functional distribution on the whole but significant differences are found in two moves of “situating the research” and “discussing the research”.