A systematic analysis of first-person identity roles in agricultural sciences

This paper presents a systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of first-person reference in a corpus of 30 Agricultural Science research articles. The analysis is based on Tang and John’s (1999) taxonomy of authorial identity roles cross-referenced with rhetorical functions within the IMRaD structure. A total of 795 instances (39.3 per 10,000 words) were found, the most frequent roles being recounter (59.5 %) and opinion-holder (32.8 %) spread across all sections. The highest density, however, was observed in the short Conclusion section and Abstract (84.1 and 75.7 per 10k, respectively). Interestingly, the qualitative analysis revealed that instances of presenting reasoned decisions for procedural choices outnumbered plain description of procedures through first-person reference in Methods. These were also frequent in the Results section, where stating results with the first-person was relatively rare (21 of 62 tokens). In the Discussion section, use of the possessive was higher than that of the subject pronoun (52.2 % vs. 46 % instances), which was attributable to writers employing our to identify the source of the data under consideration in the control of the different voices in the text. The study provides new insights into the diverse ways that authors imprint their presence on their discourse through self-reference.