There has long been a growing interest in journal article (JA) abstract writing, and this pervading interest has boosted the exigency for further research. This current study therefore aims to investigate both the various applications of verb tense and the rhetorical structure within JA abstracts. A corpus of 1,000 JAs was collected from four prestigious journals related to applied linguistics at the SSCI level. Quantitative analysis indicates the tendency of tense use for the commonly applied reporting verbs. For example, the ANOVA test shows that the frequency of present tense use is significantly higher (p< 0.05) in the "Journal of Pragmatics" abstracts. On the other hand, qualitative analysis shows the prevailing adoption of the three-, four-, and five-move theories of the CARS model, the IMRD structure, and the IPMPrC structure, respectively. The results suggest a distinct occurrence of the IMRD structure over other models. These findings present a more systematic pattern within JA abstracts and also show the potential for enlightening further pedagogy-oriented writing instruction for JA abstracts.