As the summary of a full article, an abstract plays a pivotal role in communicating the essential ideas of the work. This discourse study aims to investigate the rhetorical move distinctions of English research article (RA) abstracts published in an Indonesian national journal, namely LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching and an international journal, namely System Journal. A corpus of 120 English RA abstracts published in 2018-2020 was collected from both journals. The data were analyzed by using top-down analysis, the framework of which was the five-move model by Swales and Feak (2009). The results showed that Move 1 (65%) was conventional and Move 5 (57%) was optional in LLT Journal. Meanwhile, Move 5 (77%) was conventional and Move 1 (58%) was optional in System Journal. Move 5 Discussion (M5Dis) and Move 3 Subjects (M3Sub) were not typical in LLT Journal and System Journal sequentially. Move 2 embedded in Move 3 was present in System Journal while it was absent in LLT Journal. The most frequent move pattern in LLT Journal was the five-move pattern (M1-M2-M3-M4-M5), while the pattern in System Journal was the four-move pattern (M2-M3-M4-M5). To conclude, the rhetorical moves of RA abstract in both journals differed in terms of the optional and conventional moves, non-typical moves, embedded moves, and most frequent move pattern. Accordingly, future researchers are recommended to further investigate lexical and syntactical signals of each rhetorical move.