In the era of globalization, there is a growing need to publish the results of scientific research in international journals. Consequently, the interest in the scientific abstract as a genre of a scientific text increases. Superstructure is an important element of a text organization. The study is aimed at studying the superstructure of research article (RA) abstracts on the material of three languages ​​(English, German, Russian) as a part of a contrastive analysis, which will reveal the universal and culturally specific features in RA abstracts. The superstructure and compositional structure of the texts of RA abstracts of the subject area "linguistics" were defined with the help of logical and semantic methods. We identified the most typical sections of the superstructure of RA abstracts, analyzed their sequence, calculated the average number of words and sentences in each section and in the entire text of the abstract. The most significant superstructure sections in the English RA abstracts are Introduction and Methods, in the German RA abstracts – Methods, in the Russian RA abstracts – Methods and Results. The sections of English and German RA abstracts have a strict order, while the order of sections in Russian-language RA abstracts may vary. The study has proved the existence of culturally specific characteristics of RA abstracts concerning the obligatory sections, their length and sequence. The attitude to such cultural values as time, the nature of argumentation and the nature of thinking are the main extralinguistic factors causing the differences in the RA superstructure. The expediency of carrying out a similar broad contrastive analysis was proved; the possible additional ways of research were outlined.