The paper presents the analysis of the impact of digitalization processes occurring in research communication on the changes in the genre features of a research paper. A web-version of a research paper is usually presented as a hypertext structure, which leads to certain changes of the communicative and functional potential of this genre. The study uses online versions of research papers and review articles presented on the websites of leading international academic journals to identify the hypertext elements, which can be considered as relatively constant components of the digital version of a research paper. On the basis of the functional-pragmatic analysis, the author defines the following functions of the hypertext elements in a research paper: 1) technological entrenchment of the genre structure of a research paper; 2) effective organization of multimodal information; 3) integration of a research paper into the discursive domain of research expert communication; 4) integration of a research paper into media communication.