Since the publication of the book Genre Analysis (CUP) by Swales (1990), many studies have focused on the study of the rhetorical organisation of different sections of research articles (RAs). The organisation of RA introductions has received most of the attention. However, the focus has generally been on the structure of introductions without subsections or on the main part of introductions with subsections. The term "main part" refers to the section between the abstract and the first subsection of an introduction. However, many researchers have not specified whether the introductions they studied were followed by subsections or not. Therefore, the present study firstly focuses on the structural comparison of RAs with and without subsections. Also, the rhetorical organisation of RA introductions with subsections has not received any attention. Hence, the second purpose of the present study is to investigate how RA introductions with subsections in the field of Applied Linguistics are rhetorically organised. The corpus used in the study consisted of 50 RA introductions published in high impact Applied Linguistics journals. In the analysis, Swales' (1990, 2004) CARS model was used. The findings show that there are rhetorical differences between RA introductions with and without subsections. The study has implications for teaching academic writing to postgraduate students and novice researchers.