Genre analysis can be used as a means of understanding the communicative practices of specific discourse communities and may therefore be of particular benefit to students in higher education for whom the interpretation and production of discipline-specific texts is paramount. This study takes global medical research as a case in point and examines the generic discourse features of the experimental medical research article (RA), using a systemic-functional and 'structural moves analysis' approach. Based on this novel, combined methodology, a sequence of generic rhetorical moves and steps across a series of medical RAs are described in terms of their function and lexicogrammar. The implications of the study are discussed in relation to previous research and their potential pedagogical and methodological applications.