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Citation practices among non-native expert and novice scientific writers
Abstract
Citation is one of the most prominent features of academic writing through which academic writers both exhibit the breadth of their scholarship in a specific research area and subtly demonstrate their memberships of the disciplinary community. Citations are important rhetorical devices that allow seasoned writers to promote their current research findings persuasively and efficiently. This paper reports the results of a case study on citation practices in 14 research papers written by non-native expert and novice writers who belong to the same discipline and work in a major research university in Malaysia. Different types and functions of citations found in the established scholars’ papers were compared to those of the novice academic writers within the same research field. The findings indicated that types and functions of citations employed were different: novice writers mainly used citation to attribute while the experts used citations strategically to provide support and justify their claims. Novices mainly used citations in isolation whereas expert writers succinctly synthesized various sources and made greater use of non-integral citations. The results of the study could provide better understanding of the rhetorical functions of citations in academic writing and offer pedagogical opportunities for teaching academic writing to novice research writers.
... These interactions foster dialogic relationships to advance disciplinary knowledge (Thompson and Ye, 1991). Moreover, to persuade readers effectively, citations of relevant studies are necessary to support the proposed arguments (Hyland, 1999;Hyland, 2010;Mansourizadeh and Ahmad, 2011;Chen and Zhang, 2017). ...
... 2 Literature review 2.1 Research on citation practice in academic writing A substantial amount of research has been conducted on citation practices in academic writing. Some studies have examined the form and function of citation practices (Swales, 1986;Hyland, 1999;Thompson and Ye, 1991;Petrić, 2007;Mansourizadeh and Ahmad, 2011). Furthermore, studies have been conducted that have explored differences in citation practices in papers from different disciplines (Hyland, 1999;Hu and Wang, 2014;Wang and Hu, 2022), and differences among academic writers with different cultural backgrounds (Li, 2011;Cui and Cheng, 2014;Peng, 2019), and differences among writers with English as a second language versus native English speakers (Sun, 2009;Lou, 2011;Li, 2012;Shi, 2013;Lee et al., 2018;Li and Zhang, 2021), and differences in different genres (e.g., introductions, methodology, results, and discussion genres for empirical papers) (Martínez, 2008;Kwan and Chan, 2014;Zhang, 2022;Zhang, 2023). ...
... Embedding method: Swales (1986) classified citations as integral or non-integral, based on the position of the quoted person within or outside of the sentence. The academic community has endorsed this classification and it has been adopted by subsequent studies related to citation practices in academic writing (Hyland, 1999;Charles, 2006;Mansourizadeh and Ahmad, 2011;Samraj, 2013;Zhang, 2023;Mu, 2024). Furthermore, studies have been conducted that refined the categorization based on the syntactic position of the cited authors (Hyland, 1999;Thompson and Tribble, 2001). ...
Citation practices are crucial in academic discourse for both knowledge construction and interpersonal interaction. While prior research in academic English has explored citation practices among expert and novice authors, there is a notable gap in studies focusing on Chinese academic papers. Moreover, it remains uncertain whether insights from English-language corpora can be extrapolated to other linguistic contexts. This study presents a comparative analysis of citation practices among expert and novice authors within the field of Chinese Applied Linguistics. Utilizing a corpus of 715,000 Chinese words, we analyzed academic papers authored by both groups. Our findings reveal that citation practices between expert and novice authors are largely comparable. Specifically, integral citations were more prevalent than non-integral citations, with the cited authors predominantly occupying the subject position. In terms of citation form, the four types employed, in descending order of frequency, were summary, block quote, generalization, and quote. The analysis of reporting markers showed a predominance of discourse markers, followed by research markers, with cognitive markers being the least frequent. Notably, novice authors demonstrated certain deficiencies compared to their expert counterparts, including an overreliance on integral citations, a reduced use of generalization and block quote citations, and limited integration of information regarding reporting markers.
... It provides context (Swales, 1990), refers to the original source (Hyland, 1999;Pecorari, 2006), and shows acknowledgment of authors (Swales & Feak, 2012), thus enabling other researchers to conduct further investigations (Hewings et al., 2010;Pecorari, 2006). However, citation is not an easy skill to master (Goodarzi & Gholami, 2017;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Maroko, 2013). It is a complex skill that requires proficiency (Pecorari, 2006) and does not come with automaticity. ...
... The difficulty in mastering citations is recognized in literature (Goodarzi & Gholami, 2017;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Maroko, 2013). Vardi (2012) offered an interesting perspective on why citation is not an automatic skill, arguing that citing sources is rooted in a collection of "formative experiences." ...
... Other studies on citation practices that focused on cross-linguistic studies/ cross-cultural aspects (Barghamadi, 2021;Barghamadi & Siyyari, 2021;Bazerman, 1989;Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2016;Goodarzi & Gholami, 2017;Jolivet & Carter-Thomas, 2014;Kafes, 2017;Luzón, 2015;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Mur-Dueñas, 2009;Pecorari, 2006;Petrić, 2007;Pickard, 1995;Rabab'ah & Al-Marshadi, 2013;Samraj, 2013;Scollon & Scollon, 2001;Soler-Monreal & Gil-Salom, 2011;Thompson, 2005;Varga & Gradečak-Erdeljić, 2017) reveal that motivations on citing sources are based on personal beliefs and cultural factors that sets citation preferences. Moreover, these studies presented the similarities and differences in citation practices when culture and linguistic background are involved. ...
... Previous studies also compared citations across writers at different levels of study and/or of diverse academic writing expertise (e.g., Hu & Wang, 2014;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Petrić, 2007;Swales, 2014). Swales (2014) compared the citation practices in the writings produced by the undergraduate and graduate students in biology and identified more citations and references in the graduate papers. ...
... Swales (2014) compared the citation practices in the writings produced by the undergraduate and graduate students in biology and identified more citations and references in the graduate papers. Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) examined the types and functions of citations in papers written by experts and students in the same research group. They found that both students and experts used more non-integral citations than integral citations. ...
... In terms of structures linked to integral citations, our analysis revealed that students tended to employ verb controlling structures more frequently than naming structures. This observation is in line with the findings of Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) and Samraj (2013), suggesting that novice writers not only utilized a larger number of verb controlling citations than expert writers but also exhibited a greater discrepancy between verb controlling and naming structures compared to expert writers. As argued by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011), this can be attributed to the challenges associated with nominalization or complex noun phrases in naming structures. ...
While previous research has revealed the form and function features of citations across diverse disciplines, writer groups of varying expertise, and academic genres, limited attention has been given to the developmental trajectories in citation practices among novice academic writers. To address this issue, we conducted a corpus-based, discipline-specific analysis of the citation practices of L2 English novice academic writers over time. Using a multi-perspective analytical approach, we examined citation types and functions, along with reporting verbs and reporting structures in 39 linguistics course papers written by 13 L2 English undergraduate students across three semesters. Overall, we observed an increase in citation density, with more diverse citation forms and functions, as well as an expanding usage of reporting verbs and structures. Our results shed light on the developmental trajectory of citation practices and the persistent challenges for novice academic writers. Implications for English for Academic Purposes pedagogy are discussed.
... This persuasion is particularly evident in their literature review sections (Basturkmen, 2009;Koutsantoni, 2006). Regrettably, there has been relatively scant research that directly compares citation choices in master's theses and journal articles, and even fewer studies have focused on the specifics of literature review sections, with a few exceptions (e.g., Lee et al., 2018;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Samraj, 2013). Nevertheless, these comparative inquiries have provided limited insights into the implicit evaluations embedded in citation choices, often relying on qualitative methods with small-scale datasets. ...
... However, there have also been studies examining various aspects of citation use in different disciplines. These studies have explored the types and functions of citations (Harwood, 2009;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Petrić, 2007;Thompson, 1996;Thompson, 2005), cultural variations in citation practices (Belcher, 1994;Bloch & Chi, 1995;Pennycook, 1996), the historical development of citation as an academic writing practice (Bazerman, 1988;Salager-Meyer, 1999), and the choice of reporting verbs in conjunction with citations (Charles, 2006;Hawes & Thomas, 1997;Hyland, 1999;Thompson, 2001;Thompson & Ye, 1991). It is noteworthy that Thompson (1996) offers a highly valuable and comprehensive framework encompassing message, signal, attitude and voice for analyzing and comprehending the diverse ways in which language reports are incorporated into texts. ...
... Those studies that have compared citation choices between master's theses and research articles have primarily focused on the structure and function of citations, and their findings have been somewhat contradictory. For instance, Samraj (2013) found that master's student writers and published writers used citations for similar functions, while Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) claimed that novice writers and experts used citations for different ones, with the former focusing on attribution and the latter on justifying claims. These somewhat contradictory findings warrant further investigation. ...
In response to Petrić’s (2012) call for comparing citation practices between student and published writing in the same field to better understand the interaction between developmental and disciplinary influences on the utilization of direct quotation, this paper conducts a comparative analysis of citation choices in 100 literature review sections of L2 master's theses and 100 research article literature review sections in the field of translation studies. This analysis utilizes a modified framework of functional options for cited information. The findings reveal a significant difference in the normalized frequency of citation options between the student corpus and the expert corpus. L2 master's students predominantly rely on single-source, author-responsible, long direct quotations with active voice and past tense. This approach is used to present source information without active engagement, suggesting their primary objective is to showcase knowledge of the research field. Conversely, experts strategically employ citations to support their claims and establish intertextual links. The differences in citation choices between master's theses and research articles might be attributed to the L2 students' limited grasp of the subtle nuances associated with citation forms, reporting verbs, verb tenses and voices, as well as a lack of proficiency in employing various pragmatic and rhetorical functions achievable through citation. Additionally, these differences may be attributed to the comprehensive knowledge and experience accumulated by expert writers over time. The implications of these findings for teaching English academic writing are discussed within the paper.
... The 30 empirical JAs were input to the UAM corpus tool (version 3.3) [39] for repeated reading and coding citation features and writer identity. Following previous scholars' practice [19,22,23,40,41], instances of citations were identified and counted as such: (1) the canonical citation form (the author's name followed by a year of publication in parentheses), its variants (personal pronouns or possessive forms referring to previously cited authors), and citation forms like "ibid." were identified and counted; (2) if a single source was cited in one parenthesis, it was counted as a single citation. And if multiple independent sources occurred in one parenthesis, it was still counted as one citation; (3) citations without an actual date were not included in the count; (4) second-hand citations were treated as a single citation since they referred to the same source; (5) our study focused on literature citations, excluding references to instruments and statistical methods, quotations from research participants, and producers of corpora. ...
... It further confirms Petrić's idea [19] that experienced writers adeptly apply and integrate various citations to establish connections between sources and their own ideas, while also proposing original perspectives. Novice writers, as observed in previous studies [14,19,41], rarely relying on other more sophisticated functional types, seemed to have used citations just to attribute the source authors to "tell the knowledge" rather than "transform the knowledge" [22]. Our findings, therefore, suggest that helping novice writers understand the diverse range of functional citations needs more attention. ...
... Another valued identity in professional articles is the portrayal of the writer as a knowledgeable and professional scholar. Usually, in the Literature Review section, experienced writers cite relevant literature that they perceive to be valued, demonstrating their familiarity with the topics and portraying themselves as intertextually knowledgeable [41]. Additionally, they consciously wield existing knowledge in a much more sophisticated manner, presenting themselves in a professional light. ...
This study revealed the distributional features of literature citation and writer identity in linguistic academic discourse, and further explored how writer identity is constructed through literature citation. Based on Petrić’s citation typology and Ivanič’s writer identity framework, the study investigated various types of citations and identities in thirty journal articles published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes from 2017 to 2021. The results showed that there are a total of 1637 citation instances, among which the dominant type is attribution citation (36.59 %). Besides, the study revealed that 80.45 % of the total citations construct discoursal self only and 19.55 % reveal both discoursal self and authorial self. In terms of discoursal self, writers present themselves as a member of academic community, a contributor to a field of knowledge, a knowledgeable and professional scholar, and a reliable and credible writer. As for authorial self, they would like to position themselves to be a writer with authority and an evaluator. It is expected that the current study can help novice writers use citations strategically and establish their desired identity accordingly.
... As a central feature in research writing, the citation has received increasing attention in the academic community. Apart from contributions from disciplines like information of science and sociology of science (see White, 2004), applied linguists have also delved into various aspects of citation, such as integral vs. non-integral citations (Charles, 2006), self-citation (Hyland, 2001;Harwood, 2005), and functions of citations (Harwood, 2009;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Samraj, 2013;Hu & Wang, 2014;Fazel & Shi, 2015), thus foregrounding the significance of citation practices in the international academic community. ...
... While the sociologists used citations more to engage the reader, the computer scientists employed them more to signpost. Following Harwood (2009), Mansourizadeh andAhmad (2011) conducted a case study on citation practices in research articles written by non-native experts and papers written by novice writers from the same discipline and with the same language background. The analysis revealed that non-integral citations were the most dominant type used by the writers and that citations were employed less by novice writers compared to the expert writers. ...
... In a more precise genre-based study, different aspects of the rhetorical functions of citations have been steadily researched in the field of applied linguistics, for instance, the comparison of citation functions in various disciplines (Harwood, 2009), different groups of writers, such as native speaker student writers vs. non-native speaker student writers in Borg (2000); non-native speaker high-rated thesis writers vs. non-native speaker lowrated thesis writers in Petrić (2007); non-native speaker expert writers vs. non-native speaker novice writers (Mansourizadeh and Ahmad, 2011;Kafes, 2017); between the corresponding sections in research articles and degree theses (Samraj, 2013); between two different departments at a university (Ramoroka, 2014); and within a group of Indonesian authors (Arsyad and Adila, 2017). ...
This study aims to examine the transitivity system of rhetorical functions in the Discussion section of two articles in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes by investigating the type of processes used in the rhetorical functions and how each type of process is represented in the English lexicogrammatical system. The data for this qualitative study were collected through genre analysis on two articles on citation practices from the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. The study found that comparison with sources and attribution were the most prominent rhetorical function within the Discussion section and that in comparison with sources, verbal processes were the most dominant type of processes, followed by relational, material, and mental processes, while in attribution, relational processes were the most used type of process, with material, verbal, and mental processes following behind. The findings of the study also showed that both comparison with sources and attribution were equally important in the Discussion section.
... The other type of integral citation is integrating the name of the author by using a noun-phrase. This type is commonly referred to as integral-naming as described by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011). An example of this type is the citation used in the previous sentence in which the names of the authors Mansourizadeh and Ahmad are integrated into this paragraph by occupying the position of a noun phrase. ...
... Citation practices differ according to a number of factors. For example, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) found that citation practices differ among non-native experts and novice writers, which they attributed to their experience gap. Expert writers usually use sophisticated processes to show their own findings in relations to earlier contributions, while novice writers lack these advanced skills. ...
... Nonnative speakers usually exhibit insufficient experience in writing essays and papers, and lack of advanced writing skills compared to native writers. Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) found that expert writers usually use sophisticated processes to show their own findings in relation to earlier contributions. Furthermore, Thompson and Tribble (2001: 99) suggest that it is conventional in scientific writing to de-emphasize the role of the researchers, where the claim is that the human factor is not consequential. ...
... . The bulk of research in this area falls into several strands: the problems and strategies of L2 students in source-based writing (Cumming et al., 2018;Flowerdew & Li, 2007;Li & Casanave, 2012); citation forms and functions (Harwood, 2009;Nesi, 2021;Swales, 1990; Thompson & Tribble, 2001); citation and writing quality (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Petrić, 2007); the effect of production and error correction techniques on documentation (Boysen, 2019); the evaluation of explicit teaching of acknowledgement conventions, paraphrasing, and summarizing skills (Fazilatfar et al., 2018;Storch, 2012;Wette, 2010); and citation and disciplinary factors (Hu & Wang, 2014;Hyland, 1999;Thompson & Tribble, 2001). These studies agree that using sources in academic writing is a complex problem for learners and that sustained explicit pedagogic intervention for second language (L2) novice writers is necessary (Li & Casanave, 2012;Storch, 2012;Wette, 2010). ...
... Regarding the main problems that L2 students encounter in using citations, some of the studies discussed previously have revealed that academic writing by L2 novice writers-both undergraduate and graduate students-features serious patchwriting (i.e., close copy of the source text by altering the grammatical structure or using synonyms for one-to-one substitution) or textual borrowing (Flowerdew & Li, 2007;Li & Casanave, 2012;Wette, 2017), inaccurate paraphrases and summaries of source propositions (Storch, 2012;Wette, 2010Wette, , 2017, lack of generalization of multiple sources and restricted range of citation functions (Wette, 2017), limited range of citation types (integral and nonintegral) and functions (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Petrić, 2007;Samraj, 2013), and inaccurate documentation (Storch, 2012;Wette, 2010). ...
... Due to the complexity of citation forms and functions, how to use them appropriately has always been a hurdle for most L2 novice university students, including graduate students (Cumming et al., 2018;Flowerdew & Li, 2007;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Storch, 2012;Wette, 2010Wette, , 2017. With regard to the citation types, compared to experienced writers, L2 novice writers tend to overuse integral citations (Lee et al., 2018;Li & Zhang, 2021;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). ...
... From the theoretical perspective, this study is motivated by exploring the specific linguistic structure and textual parameters associated with successful academic writing in graduate context. In general, the major domains of writing success (or failure) have been reported to include lexis (including academic vocabulary), syntax (at phrasal and sentence levels), cohesion, and citation/referencing conventions (Biber et al., 2011;Mansourizadeh and Ahmad, 2011;Mazgutova and Kormos, 2015). On the practical side, our project is aimed at identifying a cost-effective way to develop graduate students' writing skills with minimal pressure on the faculty and university resources. ...
... Both expertise level and nativeness seem to affect writers' citation practices. For example, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) noted that at a Malaysian university, the research papers in chemical engineering produced by non-native English-speaking expert writers showed a higher density (normalized frequency per 1,000 words) of citations in each section of the research papers than the papers written by nonnative novice writers (students) in the same field (e.g., 23.19 vs. 20.1 citations per 1,000 words in the section of Introduction). In addition, in terms of citation types, non-integral citations constitute the majority of the citations (86.47% in experts' papers and 73.23% in novice writers' papers, respectively). ...
... In terms of the frequency of citations, the literature reviews written by the L2 graduate students have fewer normalized counts of citation instances or lower citation density, compared to the citation counts in the Introduction sections of chemical engineering papers reported in Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011). Meanwhile, similar to the dominant use of non-integral citations found in both expert papers and novice papers in their study, the writing samples in this study also showed a strong preference for non-integral citations (85.1 to 89.1% of raw citation counts). ...
Writing a literature review (LR) in English can be a daunting task for non-native English-speaking graduate students due to the complexities of this academic genre. To help graduate students raise genre awareness and develop LR writing skills, a five-unit online tutorial series was designed and implemented at a large university in Canada. The tutorial focuses on the following features of the LR genre: logical structure, academic vocabulary, syntax, as well as citation practices. Each tutorial unit includes an interactive e-book with explanations, examples, quizzes, and an individual or collaborative LR writing assignment. Twenty-nine non-native English-speaking graduate students from various institutions participated in the tutorials and completed five writing tasks. This study reports on their developmental trajectories in writing performance in terms of cohesion, lexical features, syntactic features, and citation practices as shown in three individual writing tasks. Corpus-based analyses indicate that noticeable, often non-linear, changes are observed in several features (e.g., use of connectives, range and frequency of academic vocabulary) across the participants' writing samples. Meanwhile, citation analysis shows a steady increase in the use of integral citations in the participants' writing samples, as measured with occurrence by the number of sentences, along with a more diverse use of reporting verbs and hedges in their final writing samples. Pedagogical implications are discussed.
... By all means, citing is a key social practice in academia (Friedman, 2019). Moreover, citations are crucial rhetorical devices permitting seasoned writers to promote their current research findings persuasively and efficiently (Hyland, 1999(Hyland, , 2002(Hyland, , 2004Kargbo, 2010;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). Meanwhile, Gupta (2017) The significance of citing other resources in academic writing indicates that the material and information cited are proposed by other scholars. ...
... There are two ways in citing material: by using signal phrase or narrative citation and by using parenthetical citation or without signal phrase (APA, 2020). In general, the terms signal phrase and narrative citation are (Hyland, 1999;Kumasi, 2012;Loan & Pramoolsook, 2016;Mansourizadeh, & Ahmad, 2011;Moore, 2014;Shi, 2008;Schiess, 2009). Hyland (1999) Overall, there is a higher density of the reference page errors than that of the citation errors (See Figure 1). ...
... (2016) reveal that in writing master's theses, Vietnamese students were not fully alert of the importance of citations as a rhetorical device in their thesis writing, and their study also shows that insufficient attention was paid to the in-text citations in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam.A study was also conducted in the field of practicing citations by non-native experts and novice scientific writers. The research carried out byMansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) manifested that novice writers mainly used citation to attribute, while the experts used citation strategically to provide support and justify their claims. Among them,Shi (2008) noted that the degree to which citational acts are discursive markings of learning and knowledge construction.Notwithstanding, a number of studies have examined the use of citation. ...
Scholars tend to give extra efforts to write the content of their study, yet some forget to pay much attention in writing the standardization of citation and reference. It yields errors in presenting citation and reference based on the guideline required by the journals. Citing and referencing are two mediums to quote authors’ opinions and also give credits for their intellectual ideas. An analysis of citation and reference of articles indexed by Scopus Quartile 2 was carried out to scrutinize errors in writing citation and reference page. The data were taken from a journal required authors to adhere the guidelines of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Ed). The method used was qualitative. The data of 68 errors in citations and 139 errors in reference page were gathered by downloading the articles from the website of the journal. The results show that errors identified in writing the citation are classified into narrative citation and parenthetical citation. Errors vary in initiating page number, incorrect use of ampersand, incorrect style of multiple citation and wrong order of multiple citations. With regard to reference page, errors are detected in writing the titles of the works, typing the references taken from journals and proceedings and no translation provided from other languages. Errors in referencing edited works and abbreviating the authors are also pinpointed. The results imply that in order to produce accurate citations and references, authors are obliged strictly to follow and conform one style required by the journal
... The other type of integral citation is integrating the name of the author by using a noun-phrase. This type is commonly referred to as integral-naming as described by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011). An example of this type is the citation used in the previous sentence in which the names of the authors Mansourizadeh and Ahmad are integrated into this paragraph by occupying the position of a noun phrase. ...
... Citation practices differ according to a number of factors. For example, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) found that citation practices differ among non-native experts and novice writers, which they attributed to their experience gap. Expert writers usually use sophisticated processes to show their own findings in relations to earlier contributions, while novice writers lack these advanced skills. ...
... Nonnative speakers usually exhibit insufficient experience in writing essays and papers, and lack of advanced writing skills compared to native writers. Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) found that expert writers usually use sophisticated processes to show their own findings in relation to earlier contributions. Furthermore, Thompson and Tribble (2001: 99) suggest that it is conventional in scientific writing to de-emphasize the role of the researchers, where the claim is that the human factor is not consequential. ...
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... Previous studies have compared variations in citation type by language (Hu & Wang, 2014), country (Peng, 2019), discipline (Davis, 2013;Hyland, 1999), writing proficiency (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Swales, 2014), and genre (Jalilifar, 2012). Differences can be found in the amount, form, and presentation of citations across these variables, and research has suggested that emerging writers must acquire discipline-specific patterns of citation type usage. ...
... Applied linguistics had particularly high frequency counts for all citation presentations, particularly summaries, which follows the fact that applied linguistics also utilized the most citations. This contrasts with findings of Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011), who found that novice writers typically make use of summaries while expert writers use generalizations more often to "succinctly synthesize various sources" (p. 152). ...
Authorial voice plays a key role in helping writers establish themselves as experts in their field as well as demonstrate their individual style (e.g., Tardy, 2012). Citation usage has an important impact on authorial voice in academic writing and can be implemented in various ways; namely, through citation types (e.g., integral, non-integral) and citation presentation (e.g., direct quotes, summaries, generalizations). While many researchers have examined citation type among novice and experienced writers, researchers have largely overlooked citation presentation across disciplines – that is, how experienced authors balance the use of quotations, summaries, and generalization to index authorial voice. Beginning academic writers may be encouraged to use quotations to prevent plagiarism, but it is unclear if this advice reflects patterns in published writing across disciplines. In this study, we examine the background sections (i.e., introductions and/or literature reviews) of 270 academic research papers to evaluate the extent to which various citation types and presentations are used in background sections across six disciplines. Findings which can inform disciplinary writing guides and educational materials indicate disciplinary variation in citation type, with applied linguistics using the most citations overall and physics and biology using the fewest integral citations. Disciplines also differed in their citation presentation, with some favoring summaries and others favoring generalizations while quotation was rare overall. These results have important implications for teachers and material developers who can use these patterns of source usage to compare and contrast disciplinary norms and provide direct instruction on features of academic voice. Cross-disciplinary awareness of voice features can also highlight disciplinary patterns for students, allowing them to write more like experts in their fields.
... Drawing upon the functions in Thompson (2001), Petrić (2007) focused precisely on the intentions of citations and summarised the rhetorical functions of citations. This approach has influenced many EAP studies to analyse citations in student writing (e.g. Lee et al., 2018;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Petrić & Harwood, 2013;Sun et al., 2022), particularly in distinguishing between rhetorically simple and complex functions. ...
... The expression of the complex rhetorical functions of citations is positively related to the quality of learners' research writing (Li & Zhang, 2021;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Petrić, 2007Petrić, , 2012. Both Petrić (2007) and Lee et al. (2018) have shown that novice researchers tend to describe existing knowledge in citations through the rhetorically simple function attribution, rather than being critical and analytical in transforming and evaluating existing knowledge through using complex rhetorical functions (e.g. ...
... De mayor interés para nuestro estudio resulta la exploración de la variabilidad entre los géneros. El comportamiento de las citas se ha investigado principalmente en el artículo de investigación (entre otros, Swales, 1990;Hyland, 1999;Fløttum, Kinn y Dahl, 2006;Mur-Dueñas, 2009) y la tesis doctoral (entre otros, Dong, 1996;Thompson y Tribble, 2001;Gallardo, 2010;Soler-Monreal y Gil-Salom, 2011), aunque en los últimos años ha venido creciendo la atención prestada a la práctica de la citación en el género que analizamos en este artículo, el Trabajo de Fin de Máster (Petrić, 2007;Jalilifar, 2012;Rabab´ah y Al-Marshadi, 2013;Samraj, 2013;Sánchez-Jiménez, 2013, 2016, 2018a, 2021Oskueia y Kuhi, 2014;Nguyen y Pramoolsook, 2016), así como en los cursos universitarios de grado (Mansourizadeh y Ahmad, 2011;Luzon, 2015;Viemeyer, 2017;Wette, 2017;Lee, Hitchcock y Casal, 2018;Zhang, 2018;Gao, Picoral y Staples, 2021;Meihami y Esfandiari, 2021). En síntesis, se ha comprobado en estos trabajos que los escritores expertos utilizan una mayor variedad de funciones de las citas en sus textos dependiendo del propósito retórico de cada apartado del escrito, mientras que, por el contrario, los universitarios se limitan a reproducir el conocimiento sobre el tema investigado mediante la atribución del conocimiento a la fuente original en todo el texto, como informan de manera más específica los estudios que han contrastado la práctica de la citación entre la escritura académica de expertos y estudiantes universitarios (Mansourizadeh y Ahmad, 2011;Jalilifar, 2012;Sánchez-Jiménez, 2020a;Meihami y Esfandiari, 2021). ...
... El comportamiento de las citas se ha investigado principalmente en el artículo de investigación (entre otros, Swales, 1990;Hyland, 1999;Fløttum, Kinn y Dahl, 2006;Mur-Dueñas, 2009) y la tesis doctoral (entre otros, Dong, 1996;Thompson y Tribble, 2001;Gallardo, 2010;Soler-Monreal y Gil-Salom, 2011), aunque en los últimos años ha venido creciendo la atención prestada a la práctica de la citación en el género que analizamos en este artículo, el Trabajo de Fin de Máster (Petrić, 2007;Jalilifar, 2012;Rabab´ah y Al-Marshadi, 2013;Samraj, 2013;Sánchez-Jiménez, 2013, 2016, 2018a, 2021Oskueia y Kuhi, 2014;Nguyen y Pramoolsook, 2016), así como en los cursos universitarios de grado (Mansourizadeh y Ahmad, 2011;Luzon, 2015;Viemeyer, 2017;Wette, 2017;Lee, Hitchcock y Casal, 2018;Zhang, 2018;Gao, Picoral y Staples, 2021;Meihami y Esfandiari, 2021). En síntesis, se ha comprobado en estos trabajos que los escritores expertos utilizan una mayor variedad de funciones de las citas en sus textos dependiendo del propósito retórico de cada apartado del escrito, mientras que, por el contrario, los universitarios se limitan a reproducir el conocimiento sobre el tema investigado mediante la atribución del conocimiento a la fuente original en todo el texto, como informan de manera más específica los estudios que han contrastado la práctica de la citación entre la escritura académica de expertos y estudiantes universitarios (Mansourizadeh y Ahmad, 2011;Jalilifar, 2012;Sánchez-Jiménez, 2020a;Meihami y Esfandiari, 2021). En la mayoría de las investigaciones centradas en el TFM, se comprobó también que en cada apartado de este género predominan diferentes funciones retóricas de las citas con relación al propósito discursivo abordado en la sección específica. ...
El presente trabajo de investigación surge del interés por conocer las diferencias culturales que existen en las prácticas de citación en el género académico del Trabajo de Fin de Máster de los escritores españoles nativos (Ee), filipinos no nativos de español (Fe), filipinos nativos de inglés (Fi) y estadounidenses que escriben en lengua inglesa (Ai), para lo que se analizaron 32 Trabajos de Fin de Máster en total, 8 por cada grupo. Para estudiar este fenómeno se utilizó la metodología cualitativa y cuantitativa basada en el análisis textual computarizado de las funciones retóricas de las citas, ordenadas en una tipología clasificadora que modificaba el esquema propuesto por Petrić en su artículo de 2007. Los resultados obtenidos en la investigación mostraron diferencias entre las convenciones culturales de los grupos en la composición de los Trabajos de Fin de Máster.
... An effective citation practice means that the writer can incorporate the information from the original author's work in a new form, attribute the context as the purpose of the study, and generate persuasive research findings in their writing. Thus, the writer needs to acquire these skills and need to be taught how to use different citation types efficiently (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). With citations, a writer can effectively develop their arguments, ideas, concepts, or findings to establish credibility and authority in their writing. ...
... Kafes (2017) in his study investigated the citation practice of novice Turkish writers and expert native English-speaking academic writers in the field of Applied Linguistics and found that both writers employed more non-integral than integral forms. The findings from other previous studies reveal that academic writers show a preference for using non-integral types in their research papers (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011), master theses, and research articles (Samraj, 2013), research articles in various disciplines (Hyland, 1999(Hyland, , 2002Hyland & Jiang, 2017). In writing the introduction chapter, ELESP undergraduate students tend to highlight and emphasize the information from the cited source because this chapter requires reviewing the prior research related to their study to establish the gaps and to extend previous knowledge. ...
This study aims to find out the forms used in citation practices of ELESP undergraduate students’ theses at Universitas Negeri Jakarta. This research uses both quantitative and qualitative methods, which employ a corpus-based analysis. The analysis is conducted by adopting Hyland (1999)’s framework of citation category and citation integration as proposed by Swales (1990). The data source of this research consists of 50 theses in English Language Teaching (ELT), especially the introduction and literature review chapters, written by ELESP undergraduate students published from 2018 to 2022 in the repository of UNJ. The results revealed that ELESP undergraduate students frequently use summary and generalization in the introduction and literature review chapter. Furthermore, the use of integral and non-integral forms in the two chapters have nearly the same frequency, which indicates that the students focus on the actions of researchers as well as emphasize the research itself in the cited sources.
... The other type of integral citation is integrating the name of the author by using a noun-phrase. This type is commonly referred to as integralnaming as described by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011). An example of this type is the citation used in the previous sentence in which the names of the authors Mansourizadeh and Ahmad are integrated into this paragraph by occupying the position of a noun phrase (Rababah & Al-Marshadi, 2013). ...
... This line of thought is in conformity with the findings of other studies like (Rababah & Al-Marshadi, 2013 ; Manan, 2015;Nguyen, 2016). Moreover, expert writers usually use sophisticated processes to show their own findings in relations to earlier contributions and seem to master citation practices, while novice writers lack these advanced skills (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). Clearly, Algerian EFL graduates are no exception in this regard. ...
... For example, they continue to overuse jargon, fragmented ideas, and unsupported opinions, and have a propensity to "spill every thought on the page" rather than to take a more scholarly "less is more" approach (Harris, 2006, p. 136). Moreover, novice academic writers mainly use citation to attribute rather than to provide support and justify their claims (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Nesi, 2021). ...
... Our study shows that although sources are present, we see patterns where they are not used for a clear theoretical point of view and perspectives as stated by Kupferberg (2012), Andersen (2020), andHarris (2006). Undergraduate novice academic writers use according to Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) citation to attribute rather than to provide support and justify their claims. Our study shows in which ways it is practiced. ...
... Genre analysis of RAs has been widely conducted by various linguists worldwide, and this approach has been used to analyze citations within RAs (Hyland, 1999;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011), including citation practices (Dobakhti & Hassan, 2017;Dobakhti & Zohrabi, 2018;Helal, 2014;Kuhi & Mollanghizadeh, 2013;Shooshtari et al., 2017;Varga & Gradečak-Erdeljić, 2017). However, although citation studies within RAs have been widely conducted, studies dealing with comparing English and Indonesian RA have received little attention from scholars. ...
... 2021; Dobakhti & Zohrabi, 2018;Kuhi & Mollanghizadeh, 2013). In addition, these findings are also similar to citations found in hard sciences, including citations in computer engineering and mechanical engineering published in international journals (Shooshtari et al., 2017), citations employed by Malaysian experts and novice authors in the chemical engineering discipline (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011), and citations in both English and Indonesian RAIs in the medicine discipline . All authors in those studies also tended to use non-integral citations when citing sources. ...
Citation studies in research articles (RAs) have been widely conducted worldwide, but such studies rarely compared English and Indonesian RAs, especially within the history discipline. Therefore, the researchers intended to analyze and compare citations in English and Indonesian research article introductions (RAIs) in the history discipline using a genre approach for the analysis and a descriptive qualitative approach for the reports. In this regard, 30 RAIs from both data sets were analyzed using two different frameworks: one is to identify citation ways and, the other one is to analyze citation types. The results revealed that English and Indonesian authors tended to employ descriptions more than other techniques when citing sources. However, English authors employed this technique more than Indonesian authors. In addition, both English and Indonesian authors also used a non-integral type more frequently than the integral counterpart, but English authors employed this type more frequently than Indonesian authors. Thus, these results conclude that although both English and Indonesian authors tended to assimilate their citations and avoid integrating them, English authors still employed this citation technique and type more frequently than Indonesian authors.
... To some extent, citing becomes a subjective activity that leads to the creation of new meaning from existing sources (Shi, 2008). Besides, citation contributes not only to contextualize the purpose of the study, but also to support finding more persuasively (Mansourizadeh and Ahmad, 2011). Above all, mastering citation is a latedeveloping phenomenon that occurs in both native and non-native English speakers (Borg, 2000;Campbell, 2002;Penny, 1996). ...
... Besides, Sabaj and Muñoz (2015) analyzed citation among disciplines. Conversely, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) analyzed nonnative novice and expert writes from Malaysia. Also, Zafrunnisha (2012) studied citation practices in PhD thesis from India. ...
Citation is a crucial rhetorical aspect that plays a fundamental role within academic writing and it is a problematic area for novice writers, especially nonnative undergraduate English teachers. However, little is known about how these teachers cite in the theoretical framework chapters of their monograph. This articles aims at describing the citation practices in a corpus conformed by 22 theoretical framework chapters of monographs written by undergraduate English teachers (UETs) in Colombia. The analysis was constituted by the citation typology of Swales (1986,1990) and Petriḉ’s (2007) functional taxonomy of citations. The results indicate that integral citation is the most used citation type in the corpus of UETs which depicts a simple for of citation. Related to functions, the attribution is highly dominant in this corpus which entails an undergraduate English teachers’ limitation in the variety of function citation. This study can be used to raise awareness on nonnative undergraduate English teachers towards better citation practices in their disciplinary academic papers.
... Some students' writing lacks agreement between in-text citations and references (Lambie et al., 2008), whereas other students fail to present the sources in their writing (Howard et al., 2010). However, few studies addressed citation and empirical studies among graduate students considering the gap of their knowledge in this aspect (Petrić, 2007;Lambie et al., 2008;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). Lambie et al. (2008) reported four main mistakes in students writing practices. ...
Research writing in the academic context functions as a vital component within higher education especially when final-year students complete their research projects. Interdisciplinary students such as those in sports management face particular difficulties when writing their research papers. The FYPXpress Version 1 Template emerged as a structured writing tool to help students manage these difficulties. This study investigated the perceptions of sports management students regarding the template's effectiveness in enhancing their research writing performance. The study involved 71 final-year sports management students from UiTM Shah Alam through a quantitative research design. A structured questionnaire evaluated five essential aspects of the template regarding its clarity and simplicity, comprehensive coverage usability, visual appeal, and guidance with examples. Strong positive significant correlations emerged between the template effectiveness and research writing performance according to Pearson correlation (r = 0.916, p < 0.05) and multiple regression results. The template effectiveness resulted in 86.8% of students' writing performance variance. The results reveal the FYPXpress Template provides significant support to students both for keeping their work organized and finding effective ways to present their research outcomes. The template provides better research writing capabilities but students need independent academic writing experience instead of relying solely on the template. The study suggests future investigations to determine how long-term use of structured writing tools influences students' capacity for independent writing. These findings advance current discussions on academic writing strategies that benefit sports management students along with other academic disciplines. Introduction The significance of academic writing has garnered considerable attention from scholars, emphasizing its critical role in higher education (Alostath, 2021). Academic research writing, particularly for final-year projects (FYPs), serves as a cornerstone of student achievement, requiring not only a strong grasp of subject knowledge but also the ability to communicate findings in adherence to academic conventions effectively (Itua et al., 2012; Alostath, 2021). To enhance the quality of research writing, students often perceive writing tool templates as valuable aids. These templates are recognized for improving writing skills and confidence by providing structure and clarity. Many students find such tools practical and time-efficient, with notable improvements in essay quality attributed to their use (Syazali et al., 2023; Adeoye, 2024). However, some express apprehension about their ability to write effectively without these tools, suggesting a dependence that could hinder the development of independent writing skills (Setyowati et al., 2022). Templates and example papers are particularly effective in developing students' writing proficiency, especially in science disciplines, where many achieve high competency levels in specific writing indicators (Syazali et al., 2023). Moreover, the use of assessment rubrics has proven beneficial by offering clear guidelines and expectations and helping refine critical elements of research writing such as problem statements and literature reviews (Bukhari et al., 2021). Despite these advancements, research writing remains a daunting and complex task for students in applied fields like sports management. The interdisciplinary nature of sports management presents unique challenges for students, who must synthesize concepts from business, physical education, and sociology. These challenges are further compounded by limited prior exposure to formal academic writing practices, making the structuring of research, adherence to academic standards, and effective synthesis of information particularly challenging (Al-Qaderi, 2016). Tools like templates have been introduced to address these difficulties, but their efficacy in meeting the specific needs of sports management students is not well-established (
... In relation to another aspect of source use, citation practices, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) found that novice writers were less likely to use citation practice strategically to embolden their arguments but would more frequently use citation to attribute information, while McCulloch (2012) found that inappropriate use of source material can be related to a weak authorial stance. As a result, Hyland (2009) contends that assessment developers must identify better rating scales for assessing student citation practice, rather than creating an inappropriate/appropriate dichotomy of source use. ...
Paraphrase or plagiarism? Exploring EAP students’ use of source material in a transnational university context.
Abstract
The relationship between paraphrase and plagiarism is complex and has
been the subject of multiple research studies. However, recent advances in
Generative AI (GenAI) have disrupted the standard practices of academic
writing and established a renewed focus on how learners acquire skills in
English writing in a higher education context. To understand the future
of academic writing in the technological era, further investigation of how
and why students choose to paraphrase and engage with source material
is needed to guide best practices in instruction, policy, and research. This
exploratory study seeks to fill this gap and provide insight into the choices
English as a Second Language (ESL) student writers make in an English for
Academic Purposes (EAP) context. Using a text-based interview method
and custom-designed academic writing task, we examine how students
engage with and make decisions about using source material. Results
reveal that participants focus more on sentence-level approaches to
paraphrasing and mechanistic methods of language transformation. This
is partly motivated by prior learning experiences but may also be related
to adopting a risk-averse approach to language use to avoid accusations
of plagiarism. Furthermore, our participants expressed a low level of
confidence in the ability of new technological tools to help learners
acquire skills in English writing. These findings suggest that there is a
need for further research exploring policies to enable experimentation
in EAP programs, as well as exploring acceptance and belief in new
technologies’ ability to support paraphrasing and source use.
... The use of sources in the NS -in place of the interpretation of the author's own findings -may reflect the reluctance to rely on one's own voice and budding expertise, which interpretation of results demands. These findings are not incompatible with Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011), an analysis of citation practices among expert and novice writers in the field of chemical engineering. While the authors note that expert writers tend to include more citations than novices, they point out that they do that for different reasons. ...
This paper offers an individual perspective on the evolution of genre standards by looking into a collection of texts published throughout 30 years of a research career by a scholar whose main field is applied psycholinguistics and whose main language of publication is English, her second language. The material is limited to concluding sections of English-language single-authored monograph chapters and journal articles published in the years 1990-2019, beginning with early, pre-doctoral publications, to full professorship contributions. The analysis focuses on the relative prominence of concluding moves and the changes in the use of first-person pronouns and epistemic markers in texts representing different stages of academic career. Apart from documenting the development of genre competence and the growth of the second language writer, the results may be indicative of an evolution of expectations towards the final text section and shed some light on the development of academic identity.
Keywords: academic writing, genre analysis, genre evolution, moves, academic identity, second language writing.
... Showing the historical trajectory of a given notion (2011) proposed a citation function that is quite similar to the current theme. They named the function 'to justify the procedures and materials' which is "used in experimental section to provide support for the procedures and the materials used in the study" (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;p. 155). ...
Researchers' thorough familiarity with the related literature together with the appropriate implementation of previous studies in academic publications is of crucial importance. Simply put, scientific studies need to address the related literature in a proper manner to get published. The main objective of the current study was to delineate citation patterns in applied linguistics. To come up with a citation framework/typology for applied linguistics, the researchers employed constructivist Grounded Theory. In order to present a comprehensive picture of citation practices, the researchers decided to investigate a corpus of five international and two local journals published between 2015 and 2020. Initial results revealed 20 themes which were then further categorized into five major themes. The results revealed considerable discrepancies between the local and international studies in employing various citation forms which can be attributed to journal polices, target audience and researchers' expertise level. Furthermore, differences were detected in quantitative and qualitative studies in using various citation techniques which can be associated with the nature of such studies. Ideally speaking, the results of the currents dissertation can have manifold implications. To begin with, the findings can divulge journal policies about citations. Simply put, the emerged themes can be quite beneficial in detecting citation norms across various journals and disciplines ultimately leading to researchers' more thorough comprehension of the citation norms and patterns.
... The prevalence of non-integral over integral citations in both subcorpora is not surprising, since previous research has revealed a similar pattern between integral and non-integral dichotomy in a research article as an entirety or cross sections [16]. As for the Methods section, one of its rhetorical purposes is to objectively describe research design [17]. Pertinently, nonintegral citations, without ascribing a grammatical role to original authors, can underscore the cited information itself and enhance objectivity required by research articles [18,19]. ...
Citations are crucial rhetorical devices in establishing intellectual linkages, contextualizing research, enhancing persuasiveness. The current study compares five novice writers’ and five expert writers’ form-based citational practice (i.e., frequency and types of citations, and reporting verbs) in the Methods section of research articles. Results show that novice writers cite less in the Methods section as a blind spot than expert writers. Although novice writers share a similar preference for non-integral citations as experts, novice writers in general are less capable of exploiting diverse denotive and evaluative reporting verbs.
... Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) declare that academic language proficiency serves as a form of assessment which determines students' engagement in disciplinary lives, thus allowing their teachers to decide whether a particular student is ready to advance to the next stages of their education or academic careers. Similarly, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) consider academic identity to be crucial in terms of developing academic writing skills. In their view, the ability to frame and project findings and results is not only influenced by general academic knowledge of a writer. ...
The article discusses selected problems of learning and using English as an academic language from the perspective of foreign students in Poland. The theoretical part of the paper concentrates on the issues related to the concept of identity and the status of English as an academic lingua franca, especially in the light of the growing role of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in university education. Such theoretical background is intended to serve as a kind of introduction to the discussion which centres around the influence of this specific social variation of the English language on the process of shaping or reshaping identities among students who have decided to continue their education outside their native language environment in the multilingual context of a university language department. Seen from such a perspective, university courses in EAP may be treated as a form of practical implementation of multilingual pedagogy and, more specifically, the idea of inclusive “classrooms” with a particular goal-oriented curriculum. The empirical part of the article presents the research project which aimed to examine the above-mentioned phenomena as experienced by a group of language students of different ethnic and national background who have been studying (and living) in Poland for at least a year. The main research technique used in this qualitative study was the semi-structured interview, selected with a view to obtaining an in-depth picture and highly personalised account of the process of (re)constructing individual identities in a specific social context and educational setting.
... However, the significant difference was only found in the use of generalizations (p=0.023), with expert writers presenting significantly higher use of generalized citations than their student counterparts (Example 4). In line with previous studies [20,24,32], the significant difference in the use of generalizations confirmed that experienced writers are more sensitive to using multiple generalizations to best support their arguments. This may be ascribed to the rhetorical importance of such citation use in building the high density of intertextual networks in the discussion part-genre [43]. ...
... What most learners had not yet grasped (such as the abstract thinking processes, the intertextuality, and the interpersonal meaning of academic texts, as well as the correspondent lexicogrammatical features) also demonstrates that their genre knowledge remained nascent (Tardy, 2009) and their procedural and conditional meta-cognitive genre awareness had not been raised by attending the EAP class. Admittedly, those are the more expert skills of thesis writing so require accumulative experiences of disciplinary practice and academic research writing rather than simply acquiring them in formal EAP instruction (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011;Tardy, 2009). Further, as the students had not engaged in their actual thesis work, they were more concerned with what the thesis writing convention was in order to fulfil the course requirements, than to further reflect on how the writing convention could be appropriately substantiated and why a thesis should be written in such a conventional way. ...
Although writing master’s theses are believed to be a major challenge for many L2 research students, there has been no extensive discussion about to what extent students are prepared for such advanced academic writing through learning in English for academic purposes (EAP) classes. This study investigated a group of novice research students learning to write master’s theses in an EAP course at a Chinese university and explored their progress in developing genre knowledge. Data were drawn from interviews, participants’ learning diaries, and their written texts. It was found that most learners had developed the macro-level formal genre knowledge, including the overall structure and content of thesis writing, and raised the declarative meta-cognitive genre awareness, but they had not yet grasped the tacit aspects of rhetorical knowledge, the micro-level formal knowledge, and the complicacy of process knowledge, including the abstract thinking processes, intertextuality, and the interpersonal meaning of academic texts, as well as the correspondent lexicogrammatical features. The nascent status of the students’ genre knowledge developed in the EAP class, and the role of EAP genre-focused instruction in preparing novice research students for their future thesis writing, are further discussed. It is suggested that thesis-focused EAP writing courses take advantage of explicit instruction to inform students about the meta-generic specifications of thesis writing and emphasize the multiple dimensions of genre knowledge development.
... The citation has great value in academic work and there are many reasons to employ citations. Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) exhibit the value and reasons of citation in the following way. ...
This study aims to understand the citation behavior of LIS research graduates in terms of their citation practices, citation motivation with the perceived quality and trustworthiness of cited sources. The paper endeavors to gain an insight into their citation behavior to gender, age, qualification, and publications. An online questionnaire survey was conducted in July 2020 to collect data from researchers who have been studying or completed their research degrees from the Institute of Information Management, University of the Punjab, Lahore-Pakistan. Data showed that almost half of the researchers published articles in journals. They preferred to cite: the most recent sources, articles written by reputable authors, highly cited sources, and articles which contain high-quality references. Researchers were motivated to cite open access and impact factor journals. There was no significant relationship between gender and any of the variables of citation behavior. However, only qualification affected the citation motivation of novice researchers. The findings may guide the policymakers about fund allocation to research projects.
... A number of studies also tried to make comparisons between expert and novice writers (Hartig & Lu, 2014;Hyland, 2006;Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). Finally, other studies investigated features such as hedges (Hu & Cao, 2011;Yang, 2013), self-mention (Walková, 2019), transition signals (Hyland, 2008a), reader engagement (Hyland & Jiang, 2016;Jiang & Ma, 2018) and bundles (Pan, Reppen & Biber, 2016;Shin, Cortes & Yoo, 2018). ...
Many academic institutions worldwide have compelled academicians to publish their works in high-impact international journals as a part of institutional hiring, promotion and reward. Besides, at many universities around the world publishing in international indexed journals has even become a prerequisite for doctoral students to obtain their degree. In this sense, the number of academic members and research students, willing to secure publication in international arena which is overwhelmingly dominated by English, are increasing. However, many scholars experience a number of troubles and difficulties in writing for publication processes. Therefore, in order to help them improve both the quantity and quality of their cientific outputs, it is very important to identify the problems scholars face in their
publication process. This study aims to investigate the linguistic problems experienced by Turkish scholars in their writing for publication process. For this reason, The Multidisciplinary Corpus of Writing for Publication was compiled as a part of this study. It consists of 216 unedited research articles written by Turkish scholars from five disciplines: communication, economics, education, engineering, and medicine. In addition, a reference corpus, consisting of 163 published research articles written by Native Speakers of English was compiled for the comparison of the Turkish corpus. Three linguistic dimensions were examined: lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and errors they made in their manuscripts. Lexical diversity was investigated using three different measures: type/token ratio, standardized type/token ratio, and moving average type/ token ratio. In the analysis of syntactic complexity, Lu’s (2010) L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA) was used.
Finally, grammatical errors were investigated using Louvain Error
Tagging Taxonomy in which grammatical errors were analyzed in 8 broad categories which were broken down into 54 subdomains.
... The literature on citations and reporting verbs has focused on research articles (Agbaglo, 2017;Hyland, 1999Hyland, , 2000Hyland, , 2002Hyland & Jiang, 2017;Hu & Wang, 2014) and theses (Nguyen & Pramoolsook, 2016;Samraj, 2013;Santos, 2018;Thompson, 2005). Scholars have focused on single disciplines (Thompson, 2001;Un-udom & Un-udom, 2020), multiple disciplines (Charles, 2006;Hu & Wang, 2014;Hyland, 1999Hyland, , 2000Manan & Noor, 2014;Thomas & Hawes, 1994) and between experts and novice writers (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011) hoping to identify variations. Aspects of citation have also received the attention of scholars: types of citation (Swales, 1990); tense (Hyland & Jiang, 2017;Thompson & Ye, 1991); across genres (Harwood, 2009;Hyland, 2000).Citation practices in individual disciplines have attracted considerable scholarly attention over the years (Agbaglo, 2017;Loan & Pramoolsook, 2015;Nguyen & Pramoolsook, 2016;Santos, 2018). ...
The study aimed at exploring the citation practices in the literature review sections in master’s theses published in the Economics discipline. Using Hyland’s (2002) classification of reporting verbs, fifteen (15) literature review chapters were extracted from fifteen Economics master’s theses and analysed with AntConc software. Following the results of the study, it was revealed that all three types of reporting verbs were employed varyingly in the theses. Denotatively, the Discourse Acts was the frequently used category of the reporting verbs as compared to the Research Acts and Cognition Acts. On the evaluative function, findings and assurance verbs were employed frequently. While the study contributes to existing literature, it guides the practice of appropriate use of reporting verbs in academic writing.
... Citations are essential for writers' intellectual property rights to be protected. Academic writers frequently use citations to situate their present study within existing literature and to give supporting evidence in their research writing [3]. ...
Citation is important in academic writing because it informs the reader about the quality and authority of the information quoted. In-text citations and end-text citations or references are the two types of citations. A reference list provides readers with the information they need to locate and retrieve books cited in a text. End-text references are used to provide this information. Writers can use a variety of citation styles in their writing, such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and others. The goals of this study were to identify the end-text reference forms used in written final project reports and identify the issues using end-text references in written final project reports. The data were collected using an analytic qualitative method, which included the use of a note-taking technique. The research’s data came from a selection of final projects done by English teacher candidates. Identification of end-text reference forms and difficulties with end-text references were used to examine the data. The findings show that (i) the writers primarily use end-text references, as recommended in the department’s final project writing guidelines, and (ii) there are several major issues with the use of end-text references in written reports of selected final projects, including incompleteness, inconsistency in the use of end-text reference styles, and incorrect citation order. Keywords: end-text reference, final project, teacher candidates
... Other novice writers tend to cite others' work for the sake of citing them. On the other hand, expert researchers cite to synthesize relevant work, justify their claims, and give support to their argument (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). To cite effectively, authors should use reporting verbs properly (Yeganeh & Boghayeri, 2015). ...
Background: Synonymous words behave differently, and language users should be aware of the fact that though near-synonyms share similar denotational meanings, they require different collocates. Further, with specific collocates, they provoke a special affective meaning called semantic prosody. To give an example of this problematic area, researchers use a lot of reporting verbs that merely describe an opinion such as argue, claim, believe, etc. or state
facts such as fi nd, confirm, cite, etc. Such verbs cannot be used interchangeably as some novice researchers usually do when they discuss their findings or compare their results with others’.
Purpose: This study aimed at examining the semantic prosody of 24 research verbs commonly used by researchers. For this purpose, collocational behavior of nearly synonymous verbs was examined. Compared to previous studies, this study considered only adverbs co-occurring with such research verbs.
Methods: The researcher used the Directory Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is of 2.6 billion words and 659,132 texts, and focused on predicational adverbs that end in –ly. For the purpose of the study, adverbs with positive semantic prosody are those proving a stronger attitude towards the proposition, improving the quality, quantity, manner of a piece of information or its the relation to the topic or those suggesting a higher level of certainty.
Results: Investigating 24 research verbs related to hypothesizing, reporting, and summarizing, the researcher found that such verbs have different sets of collocates and thus distinct semantic prosodies. Results showed that 12 of the research verbs were positive (i.e., quantify, argue, claim, suggest, state, mention, indicate, outline, summarize, encapsulate, recapitulate, and reveal), whereas 12 verbs (i.e., hypothesize, review, conclude, presume, posit, assume, theorize,
speculate, note, report, fi nd, and postulate) were neutral.
Implications: The study has its own implications for writing instructors and researchers. Novice researchers should not use some research verbs interchangeably as they require different collocates of adverbs. Further, future research should address the relationship between word’s etymology and semantic prosody as the present study showed that verbs derived from Latin (e.g., conclude, hypothesize, postulate, etc.) are neutral compared to those that are originally French.
Personality and Individual Differences (PAID) publishes groundbreaking theoretical and empirical research on abroad spectrum of psychology-related topics since its inception in 1980. The journal is highly valued among academics, researchers, and professionals due to its distinctive contributions to the field of psychology. A state of the art bibliometric techniques were applied to deeply assess PAID's impact over the past four decades. The journal's progression is examined from a historical perspective, analyzing 12,702 peer-reviewed articles and 369,735 citations between 1980 and 2022. Data from the Web of Science database was used to assess the mostcited articles, productive and influential authors, key contributing countries, and frequently used keywords. A bibliographic coupling analysis further identified nine distinct research themes based on shared bibliographies,
such as, measurement and psychological assessment, learning and cognitive abilities, psychological factors and coping strategies, personality traits and dimensions, cognitive abilities and social influence, dark personality
traits and individual behavior, behavioral and emotional regulation models, emotional intelligence and human behavior, and perfectionism and personality traits. These distinct clusters represent key areas of focus within PAID over the last four decades, having attracted significant attention from the academic community and are poised to shape the future trajectories of PAID.
Syntactic complexity (SC) is an important construct for gauging L2 writing proficiency. Previous studies, including Biber et al. (2016) and Dong et al. (2023), have largely focused on syntactic elaboration and disregarded syntactic diversity. This study investigates how academic writing proficiency is associated with SC, through an evaluation of both the variety and elaboration of sentence structures. To that end, a corpus of the abstract sections of MA theses, PhD dissertations, and empirical research articles in applied linguistics produced by Iranian English medium academic writers was compiled. Drawing on automated text analysis tools (Stanford Core NLP and L2 SC analyzer), we measured syntactic elaboration and diversity of the texts written by three distinct sets of academic authors. The results indicated that phrasal and global measures of syntactic elaboration significantly predicted academic writing proficiency in both novice and expert writers. The results of the second phase of the study indicated that the incorporation of syntactic diversity measure considerably increased the predictive power of the model. The pedagogical implications of the findings for academic writing instruction through consciousness-raising activities for both novice and expert writers are discussed.
This paper presents a mixed-method study that integrates genre-based corpus analysis and discourse-based interviews to examine the form- and stance-related citation patterns in the research articles of ten first- and second-year engineering doctoral students. The corpus analysis reveals strong preferences for stance-marked citations and the proclaim and entertain devices in particular, suggesting that writers use authorial stance to endorse cited propositions or provide likelihood- or evidence-based judgments in citations. Interview results indicate a discordance between writers’ intentions and their stance-related linguistic choices, as well as varied perceptions of authorial stance. Despite the frequent use of stance markers in citations, most writers claimed to be neutral reporters of knowledge. Only a few acknowledged their strategic stance choices and demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the rhetorical roles citations play in their claim-making practices. The findings suggest that students with developing citation expertise lacked the academic and disciplinary expertise to understand the interplay among citations, authorial stance, and rhetorical move/step structures in their research writing. These writers could benefit from explicit feedback that raises their awareness of the strategic use of citations and stance, to facilitate the realization of rhetorical goals in research writing.
This study examines the citation practices of English majors in their academic writing through text analysis and semi-structured interviews. The results show
that students incorporated various sources in their writing and accurately reported the main information of sources. In addition, they usually used citation to support their points, which makes their texts more convincing. However, students’ texts show a low citation density, and they tend to include long direct quotes. Students also cited much information from the Internet without examining its authority. In terms of citation strategies, they relied heavily on summary strategy, and rarely used paraphrasing, generalizations, or synthesizing multiple sources. Interview results show that students faced four challenges in citation: literature search, reading comprehension, paraphrasing and citation format. The results of this study have implications for teaching academic writing to undergraduate students.
Academic writing not only conveys academic content but also represents the authorial identity, serving as a means of presenting one’s identity. Writers utilize various linguistic resources to present different possibilities of self, such as intertextuality, thereby constructing their authorial identity. This study examines the Chinese EFL learners’ construction of authorial identity in academic writing from an intertextuality perspective. This study adopts a mixed method, utilizing interviews and written texts as data sources. Results were found that novice writers primarily construct their identities through the practices of direct intertextuality during the initial stages of identity construction. As novice writers gain more experience through extensive reading and writing practices, as well as academic writing courses, their intertextuality practices undergo a transformation. They begin to shift from direct intertextuality to indirect intertextuality, aiming to express their own conceptions, attempting to be like a “scholar” through indirect intertextuality. The study highlights the importance of intertextuality in the construction of academic writing identity for EFL learners. By understanding the interplay between intertextuality and authorial identity, educators can better assist EFL learners in achieving success in their academic writing endeavors.
Despite a long history of citation research, its focus has been on the linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of citations rather than their semantic nature. Using a move-based approach grounded in the CARS model (Swales, 1990), this paper studies the sorts of source ideas cited in different parts of literature reviews (LR) of Information Systems research articles following the design science research (DSR) and interpretivist research (IR) paradigms. Findings reveal three types of epistemically-oriented semantic content – theoretical, research, and methodological – and one type that is non-epistemically-framed, which vary quantitatively and qualitatively between the DSR and IR LRs. For example, both types of LRs cite more often in Move 1 Establishing a territory than in Moves 2 and 3 Establishing a niche and Occupying the niche, with theoretical terminologies, definitions, propositions being referred to more frequently in the IR writing than in the DSR writing. On the other hand, citations in the DSR writing often display prescriptive propositions, design concepts, artefacts, and methods which are absent from the IR writing. These findings not only help us better understand how citation is shaped and constrained by rhetorical moves and research paradigms but also provide implications for the teaching of citation content.
This review aims to outline topics of interest and methodological approaches of empirical studies on source-use research from 2000 to 2020. The following research foci are identified: (1) the source misuse from the perspective of concept dimension; (2) the rhetorical strategy; (3) the source-use skill; and (4) the assessment from the perspective of the sentence and discourse dimension, indicating that studies on source use are from the rhetorical perspective of texts to interpersonal functions of texts and then cognitive processes of writers. Then, the frequently used research methodologies were the qualitative approach and mixed methods. Our review further discussed three central themes for future research: (1) the comparative and longitudinal study; (2) the assessment; and (3) the local development of source use, e.g. the continuation task in China. Methodological directions were also pointed out for future source-use studies.
This study investigates how sensitizing graduate L2 students about source-text use might affect their citation practices. Two summary writing tasks involving two similar published articles, one irrelevant and one pertinent to source-text use, were assigned individually to 16 graduate English language teaching students from Iran. After completing the tasks, the students participated in retrospective interviews about their source-text use. Recursive thematic data analysis indicated that while they were inclined towards more direct source-text use in the first summary, they opted for more indirect and academic source-text use that involved their contribution and interpretation in the sensitizing task. The paper discusses the significance of sensitizing students to source-text use.
Citations are an integral component of writer-reader dialogic interaction in academic discourse. One under-researched question concerns the role of audience as a contextual factor that impacts writers’ citation choices and the nature of the identity and disciplinary knowledge that they construct. The present study adopts a discourse analytic, case-study research design. First, it aims to investigate the citation behavior in five Arabic education research articles. Second, it examines whether the writers of these papers would modify their intertextual style to enact different identity and disciplinary community when writing in English as a foreign language (EFL). Findings revealed a unique character for the Arabic-based citation behavior that contrasted, sometimes, markedly with conventional academic norms, indicating the pivotal role that culture plays in shaping rhetorical preferences. Arabic-based tendencies involved predominance of integral citations, use of combined citations and non-citations, and reliance on what is herein termed intertextual saturation and diffused intertextuality as rhetorical strategies to contract dialogic space and persuade audience. The findings also showed marginal modification of intertextual style in the EFL texts. This suggests lack of significant orientation toward target audiences’ characteristics that would have resulted from enculturation into disciplinary community. The findings imply the need to introduce novice writers to the concept of audience if they are to produce academic discourse that is interpersonally optimal from the perspective of the international discourse community.
La scrittura accademica fa parte di quell’importante competenza che Jim Cummins definisce Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency. A confermare tale importanza sono numerosi lavori di taglio sia teorico che applicativo destinati ad apprendenti d’italiano, ma soprattutto a studenti di madrelingua. Il presente contributo si propone di analizzare la scrittura accademica negli apprendenti sinofoni, con particolare riferimento all’uso della citazione nelle produzioni degli apprendenti cinesi in L1 e L2 e, nello specifico, intende rispondere a tre quesiti di ricerca: 1. in che modo gli apprendenti citano rispettivamente in L1 e L2? 2. Dal momento che le citazioni possono avere funzioni diverse, tali funzioni si differenziano nelle produzioni degli apprendenti? Se sì, come? 3. Quali possibili suggerimenti didattici possono essere tratti per l’insegnamento della scrittura accademica a studenti sinofoni e non?
Teaching academic writing in Italian L2: citation practice
Academic writing is one of the important skills that Jim Cummins defines as Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency. To demonstrate its importance, numerous theoretical and applicative works are intended for learners of Italian, but especially for native speakers. This paper aims to analyze academic writing in Chinese students, with particular focus on the use of citation in the productions of Chinese students in FL and SL, and more specifically, it intends to answer the following three research questions: 1. How do learners cite in FL and SL respectively? 2. Since citations can have different functions, do these functions make a difference in students’ written productions? If yes, how? 3. What possible didactic suggestions can be drawn for teaching academic writing to Chinese and non-Chinese students?
It is one of the concerns of EAP to bridge the disparity of discursive practice between novice and expert writers, but the comparison is largely made across a broad knowledge field and little is known about the likely divergence within a disciplinary divide. In this study, we explore the epistemic positioning in research writing by PhD students and expert writers across applied and pure science disciplines. By focusing on hedges and boosters as its main devices, we examine their forms and functions in the academic texts. Results show that PhD students in applied disciplines use significantly fewer epistemic devices than experts but no significant difference was found in pure sciences. Apart from the differences in linguistic choices, student writers show a preference for authorial positioning at the outset of academic texts while professionals tend to comment on research findings and establish a persuasive interpretation of their value. Additionally, novice writers are inclined to hedge on numerical information (about) but expert writers hedge on claims (likely). We discuss the results from the perspectives of disciplinary epistemology and writer identity. Pedagogical implications are raised on the teaching of epistemic positioning and the enculturation of disciplinary stance in academic writing classrooms.
There have been numerous investigations in recent years into the linguistic and rhetorical features of research articles,
but none, to our knowledge, has examined the ‘fringe phenomenon’ of imperatives This study investigates the use of imperatives
in research articles from ten disciplines Five articles in each field, all five from one journal, were scanned for imperative
uses in both main text and notes, and instances were collated and analysed In fields where imperatives were present in the
main text (five out of ten), we recorded interviews with the authors of one of the articles Results show that main-text imperatives
tend to congregate in sections where the principal argumentation occurs, but are very unevenly distributed across fields The
interview data also reveals that, despite the potentially face-threatening nature of imperatives, authors use them for vanous
strategic purposes such as engaging the reader, achieving text economy, or manifesting personal style Finally, there appear
to be a number of field-specific expectations and conventions Given these subtleties, a case can be made for rather more sophisticated
materials for NNS researchers and students than currently available
This paper presents a case study of writing tasks in graduate courses at a large, American university. The study investigates writing tasks across the curriculum and draws implications for curriculum design in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Using actual course syllabi for task analysis, the researchers analyzed 200 course syllabi from 20 academic departments covering a wide range of disciplines. Findings indicate that library research papers and project reports are the most commonly assigned tasks across the curriculum. This study also found that professors in the social sciences, arts, and humanities assign a wider variety of writing assignments and more writing assignments in general than do professors in the sciences, math, and engineering. Finally, while many courses in the sciences, math, and engineering require no writing assignments at all, each of these departments does have at least some courses requiring extended writing.
John Swales's 1986 article 'Citation analysis and discourse analysis' was written by a discourse analyst to introduce citation research from other fields, mainly sociology of science, to his own discipline. Here, I introduce applied linguists and discourse analysts to citation studies from information science, a complementary tradition not emphasized by Swales. Using replicable bibliometric techniques, I show that interdisciplinary ties have grown among citation researchers from discourse analysis, sociology of science, and information science in the years since Swales wrote. Key authors, journals, articles, and books are presented in tables based on cocitation data from the Institute for Scientific Information. While theoretical integration of the different strands of research is far from complete, this article carries the effort forward by reviewing contributions from the 1970s to the present in three major lines of research: citation classification, content analysis of citation contexts, and studies of citer motivations. I pay particular attention to ideas that bear on teaching the art of citing-for example, in courses in English for research purposes-and to controversies in citation research of interest to discourse analysts.
Citation is a key means by which authors signal their affiliation to their disciplinary community and the place of their work within it. Choices made regarding what work to cite is a crucial aspect of the interpersonal dimension of academic texts, with the act of citing making visible a network of scholarly relations. Citation choices indicate, among other things, an author's estimation of previous work in their field, help to construct the author as a member of his or her disciplinary community, and provide an opportunity to promote his or her own work, or the work of colleagues. The paper draws on a 1.5 million word corpus of published psychology articles and uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore in particular the citation practices of scholars working in non-Anglophone contexts, but publishing their research in English. The aim of this paper is to foreground the significance of the geolinguistic dimension to citation practices which is often backgrounded in studies of scholarly disciplinary community building.
Appropriate reference to other texts is an essential feature of most academic writing, and we should expect courses in academic writing to sensitize students to the choices that are available to them when they decide to refer to other texts. A brief review of popular EAP writing textbooks finds, however, that attention is given mainly to surface features of citation, focusing on quotation, summary, and paraphrase. Analysis of a purpose-built corpus of academic text can reveal much about what writers actually do, and can also generate rich speculation on why writers do what they do. Extending Swales' (1990) division of citation forms into integral or non-integral, we present a classification scheme and the results of applying this scheme to the coding of academic texts in a corpus. The texts are doctoral theses, written in two departments: Agricultural Botany and Agricultural Economics. The results lead into a comparison of the citation practices of writers in different disciplines and the different rhetorical practices of these disciplines. Comparison with Hyland (1999), which looks at citation types in research articles, also indicates differences between genres. We then look at examples of EAP student writing and apply the same analysis to these texts. The results show that the novice writers use a limited range of citation types, and we suggest that teaching should focus on extending the range of choices available to students. Lastly, we introduce a number of class activities in which students conduct their own analyses of citation practices in small corpora, to develop genre awareness, and we evaluate these activities.
This article reports on how three English-speaking advisors and their non-native English-speaking doctoral students used citations and related writing techniques to make new knowledge claims in science dissertation writing. The study focuses on the introductory chapter of the dissertations. The research data consist of drafts of the students’ dissertations, analysis of the draft texts, observations during writing conferences and lab meetings, background interviews, and in-progress interviews. The study investigated: 1) the selection of cited works; 2) how the students and their advisors contextualized their research and made claims to novelty; 3) how the advisors inducted their students into the disciplinary culture and its citation practices; and 4) the influence of language and cultural differences on the students and their advisors. The findings revealed that the academic advisors played an important role in helping their three graduate students learn how to construct new knowledge claims. The study also found no negative influence from the students’ native language and culture on their acquisition of academic language and conventions.
Prologue Part I. Practice: Introduction I 1. Meaning 2. Community 3. Learning 4. Boundary 5. Locality Coda I. Knowing in practice Part II. Identity: Introduction II 6. Identity in practice 7. Participation and non-participation 8. Modes of belonging 9. Identification and negotiability Coda II. Learning communities Conclusion: Introduction III 10. Learning architectures 11. Organizations 12. Education Epilogue.
The ethnographic study performed by Bruno Latour engaged him in the world of the scientific laboratory to develop an understanding of scientific culture through observations of their daily interactions and processes. Latour assumed a scientific perspective in his study; observing his participants with the "same cold, unblinking eye" that they use in their daily research activities. He familiarized himself with the laboratory by intense focus on "literary inscription", noting that the writing process drives every activity in the laboratory. He unpacked the structure of scientific literature to uncover its importance to scientists (factual knowledge), how scientists communicate, and the processes involved with generating scientific knowledge (use of assays, instrumentation, documentation). The introduction by Jonas Salk stated that Latour's study could increase public understanding of scientists, thereby decreasing the expectations laid on them, and the general fear toward them. [Teri, STS 901-Fall; only read Ch. 2]
In this paper I explore the ways in which academic citation practices contribute to the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Based on the analysis of a computer corpus of 80 research articles and interviews with experienced writers, the study investigates the contextual variability of citations in eight disciplines and suggests how textual conventions point to distinctions in the ways knowledge is typically negotiated and confirmed within different academic communities. Clear disciplinary differences are identified in both the extent to which writers refer to the work of others and in how they depict the reported information. Writers in the humanities and social sciences employed substantially more citations than scientists and engineers, and were more likely to use integral structures, to employ discourse reporting verbs, and to represent cited authors as adopting a stance to their material. It is argued that these differences in citation practices are related to the fact that academics actively participate in knowledge construction as members of professional groups and that their discoursal decisions are influenced by, and deeply embedded in, the epistemological and social conventions of their disciplines.
Scientific claims and community values: Articulating an academic culture. Language and Communication 17 (1):19-32. Scientific claims and community values: articulating an academic culture Abstract This paper explores one means by which academic texts reflect the beliefs and practices of the disciplines for which they are written. It focuses on the expression of knowledge claims in biology research articles and argues that claim mitigation incorporates important cultural assumptions. By hedging the certainty of their claims, scientists simultaneously express disciplinary values, conveying information about the nature of reality and how it should be mediated between community members. The article argues that claims help realise the work of science by embodying the values of empiricism, collegiality and competitiveness, thus providing a link between a disciplinary culture and the surface features of its texts.
Recent research on academic writing has established the intersection of writing and identity. However, it is not clear whether writers themselves are aware of this link. In this study, we investigated five ESL graduate students’ awareness of the identities that they constructed through the appropriation of others’ words and ideas in their texts. Moving beyond prevalent moral explanations, we further sought alternative reasons for students’ inappropriate textual borrowing practices, often categorized as plagiarism. Our findings suggest that, depending on their enculturation into disciplinary discourses, students exhibit different levels of awareness of the available and privileged identity options in the social contexts of writing. We argue that student textual plagiarism can best be viewed as an issue of authorial identity construction. The findings indicate that the roots of students’ production of institutionally unacceptable texts lie in their epistemological orientation as well as their authoritative view of source texts. We finally reflect on the implications of the findings for academic writing instruction. Drawing on the notion of students-as-ethnographers, we suggest that writing instruction can raise students’ awareness of the link between writing and self-representation as well as the epistemology underpinning academic authorship, as two important dimensions of successful writing.
This study investigates the phraseological patterning that occurs in reporting clauses used to make references to others’ research. It examines finite reporting clauses with that-clause complement and draws upon two corpora of theses written by native speakers in contrasting disciplines: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international relations and 300,000 words in materials science. The findings show that both disciplines use significant numbers of these reporting clauses and that they most frequently occur as integral citations with a human subject. Following the work of [Francis, G., Hunston, S., & Manning, E. (1996). Collins cobuild grammar patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins], the reporting verbs are analysed into semantic groups. Further evidence of patterning is found in both the verb groups and the tenses that occur. In both corpora, the most frequent verb group is argue (e.g., argue, note, suggest) and the most frequent tense is present (e.g., Skinner arguesthat…). In materials science, however, there are almost as many instances of the find/show verb group (e.g., show, find, observe) and these occur predominantly in past tense (e.g., Sun (1990) showedthat…). The rhetorical functions of these patterns are discussed and explanations proposed based on genre and discipline. This research underlines the importance of phraseology in academic writing and ends by suggesting how working with patterns can be beneficial in raising students’ language awareness.
This study compares rhetorical citation functions in eight high- and eight low-graded master's theses in the field of gender studies, written in English as a second language. The following rhetorical functions of citations are identified: attribution, exemplification, further reference, statement of use, application, evaluation, establishing links between sources, and comparison of one's own work with that of other authors. It is shown that both sets of theses use citations predominantly for attribution, suggesting that one of the functions of citation in student writing is knowledge display. The use of citation for non-attribution functions is found to be considerably lower in the low-rated theses than in the high-rated theses, both in the whole theses and in individual chapters. The findings show that there is a relationship between citation use and thesis grade, thus pointing to the importance of effective citation strategies for students’ academic success. In conclusion, the paper argues that source use and citation skills should receive more attention in EAP instruction and suggests activities focusing on this area of academic writing.
Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic expressions referring to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement and, in academic contexts, reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitudes and commitments. In this paper, I explore how advanced second language writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre. The paper examines the purposes and distributions of metadiscourse in a corpus of 240 doctoral and masters dissertations totalling four million words written by Hong Kong students. The paper proposes a model of metadiscourse as the interpersonal resources required to present propositional material appropriately in different disciplinary and genre contexts. The analysis suggests how academic writers use language to offer a credible representation of themselves and their work in different fields, and thus how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities.
This paper is an emic, interview-based study of computer scientists’ and sociologists’ accounts of the functions of citations in their writing. Twelve informants took part in the research, commenting upon their citations in one of their own articles. Informants were not provided with functional checklists, and were free to ascribe as many functions to each citation as they wished. Eleven citation functions are identified and described, and evidence of inter- and intra-disciplinary similarities and differences is provided. While the computer scientists used citations to direct their audience to further reading more often, the sociologists’ texts featured more cases of critical citations. The type of paper informants were writing (e.g. theoretical/empirical), the anticipated audience, and the publication outlet resulted in intra-disciplinary differences. Over half of the citations in both fields were said to have more than one function. The insights and implications of the study are discussed.
Full paper available from https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/f9e913b7-c733-36e3-e63a-f819fe57e802/1/
This paper compares published writing produced by British and Sudanese medical researchers. Twenty research articles were examined, 10 by British and 10 by Sudanese writers. All had been published in highly regarded international journals. As expected, all 20 articles conformed to editorial requirements and followed the conventional IMRD structure to a large extent. Differences were noted in the realisation of these components, however, and particularly in the discussion section where the reported findings were interpreted in terms of their significance and relevance. The British and Sudanese writers differed in their use of hedging, and the British writing made far greater use of nominalisation, both to express authorial disinterestedness and to realise processes and attributes in a more succinct way. Such variations are subtle and may not be immediately obvious to the reader, but could usefully inform the content of academic writing courses in Sudanese medical schools.
There is a popular belief that scientific writing is purely objective, impersonal and informational, designed to disguise the author and deal directly with facts. But while ESP courses often provide the linguistic means to accomplish this invisibility, they often ignore the fact that effective academic writing always carries the individual's point of view. Writers also need to present their claims cautiously, accurately and modestly to meet discourse community expectations and to gain acceptance for their statements. Such pragmatic aspects of communication however are vulnerable to cross-cultural differences and L2 students are rarely able to hedge their statements appropriately. This paper argues that hedging devices are a major pragmatic feature of effective scientific writing and that students should be taught to recognise and use them in their own work. It examines the frequency, functions and realisations of hedges and discusses a range of strategies for familiarising students with their appropriate use.
This paper investigates the nature of texts produced for assessment at the highest level of advanced academic literacy: PhD theses. Eight theses from within a single department (Agricultural Botany) at a British university are the subject of study, and the contexts in which these texts were written are investigated through interviews with the supervisors. The notion of a genre of the PhD thesis is problematized and it is argued that a genre-analytic approach can be highly generative. Finally, the ways that the writers manipulate focus and position within their texts is explored through an investigation of citation practices in the theses.
Citation function is defined as the author's reason for citing a given paper (e.g. acknowledgement of the use of the cited method). The automatic recognition of the rhetorical function of citations in scientific text has many applications, from improvement of impact factor calculations to text summarisation and more informative citation indexers. We show that our annotation scheme for citation function is reliable, and present a supervised machine learning framework to automatically classify citation function, using both shallow and linguistically-inspired features. We find, amongst other things, a strong relationship between citation function and sentiment classification.
Author self-citation has long been of interest to those working in informetrics for what it reveals about the publishing behavior of individuals and their relationships within academic networks. While this research has produced interesting insights, it typically assumes either that self-citation is a neutral form of reporting not unlike references to others' work or an unsavory kind of academic egotism. By examining self-citation in a wider context of self-mention, however, the phenomenon can be seen as part of a more comprehensive rhetorical strategy for emphasizing a writer's personal contribution to a piece of research and strengthening his or her knowledge claims, research credibility, and wider standing in the discipline. These meanings are not easily revealed through quantitative bibliometric methods and require careful text analyses and discourse-based interviews with academics. In this paper I explore the use of self-citation and authorial mention in a corpus of 240 research articles and 800 abstracts in eight disciplines. Through an analysis of these texts and interviews with expert informants I show how self-mention is used and the ways these uses reflect both the promotional strategies of individuals and the epistemological practices of their disciplines.
This essay argues that the success of organizations depends on their ability to design themselves as social learning systems and also to participate in broader learning systems such as an industry, a region, or a consortium. It explores the structure of these social learning systems. It proposes a social definition of learning and distinguishes between three `modes of belonging' by which we participate in social learning systems. Then it uses this framework to look at three constitutive elements of these systems: communities of practice, boundary processes among these communities, and identities as shaped by our participation in these systems.
This article reviews research and developments that are relevant to second language students writing in academic settings. First, it reviews research into writing requirements at undergraduate and postgraduate levels of study. It then discusses the particular socio-cultural context of academic writing, including the notions of genre and discourse community, and the politics of academic writing. The article then reviews descriptions of academic writing that draw on register studies, discourse studies, genre studies, and corpus studies. This includes cross-cultural comparisons of academic writing, disciplinary differences in academic writing, and critical views on the nature of academic writing. The article then reviews the development of approaches to the teaching of academic writing. The article concludes with a discussion of the assessment of academic writing and indications for future research in the area of second language academic writing.
Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of the Disciplines A comparison of the use of citations in Chinese and English academic discourse
- C J Bazerman
- L Chi
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Becher, T. (1989). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of the Disciplines. Milton Keynes: SRHE/ Open University Press. Bloch, J., & Chi, L. (1995). A comparison of the use of citations in Chinese and English academic discourse. In D. Belcher, & G. Braine (Eds.), Academic writing in a second language. Essays on research and pedagogy (pp. 231–273). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Citation practices in PhD theses Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective
- P Thompson
Thompson, P. (2000). Citation practices in PhD theses. In L.Burnard & T. McEnery (Eds.). Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective (pp. 91–101).
State of the art review: academic writing
- Paltridge
A comparison of the use of citations in Chinese and English academic discourse
- Bloch
Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective
- P Thompson