In Academic Writing, Giltrow introduces a new idea regarding academic writing as a practice of knowledge-making. In the process of constructing knowledge, different disciplines show diversity in the styles of writing. (Giltrow, 2009). Giltrow’s new reasoning of genre- combination of situation and forms- provides researchers a way to analyze the similarities of documents in order to compare the disciplinary differences in styles of expression.
The research paper is an important example of the research genres and a typical way of constructing new knowledge in academic discourse. According to Giltrow, successful writing depends upon readers’ recognition of features of genre. Therefore academic writers do not only need to make the results of their research public, but also persuasive. (Ken hyland, 1999) Citation, which is one of the most remarkable features appearing in scholarly articles, brings out a common ground shared by readers and writers to review the validity and novelty of both previous and current argument.
Ken hyland, 1999; Giltrow, 2009)The relationship between different citation forms and different disciplines has been investigated by many researchers. Hyland, who is a professor of applied linguistics, has done immense amounts of research in investigating the similarities and variability of citation in 8 disciplines. He suggests the disciplinary convention of citation usage and the motives behind those patterns. However, Hyland neglects the variation of citation practice that may occur in journal articles of different research directions within a discipline.The main purpose of this study is to examine the potential citation patterns of introduction sections employed by the articles in clinical and experimental subfield of psychology.
Method This paper is based on four psychology articles, consisting of two papers from clinical psychology and another two from experimental psychology. Psychology can be regarded as a typical academic discipline within the social sciences and clinical and experimental are the main sub-fields.These four articles were chosen at random from EBSCO, which is considered to be a leading provider of academic research databases for universities. To compare the use of citation in clinical psychology and experimental psychology, the selection of research articles was accessed by prescribing a limit to the research methodology: clinical case study for the former and experimental replication for the latter by using the advanced searching tool provided by EBSCO database.
The corpus was searched manually for data about citation practice including total number of citations employed as well as the number of integral: integral, that is authors’ name are integrated in citing sentence, and non-integral citations, which put authors’ name in parenthesis or by superscript numbers, occurring in the introduction section. (Hyland, 1999) According to Giltrow, citation plays a vital role in constructing the state of knowledge and knowledge deficit, which are features of academic writing in introductions.For this reason, introduction sections could be regarded as a good representation of whole article for citation analysis. Next I tested the data into charts to indentify similarities and differences between these four sub-field articles.
Finally, I interpreted the findings and illustrated the possible patterns based on previous research in Hyland’s Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge.
