Discussing limitations in disciplinary writing: Self-reported limitations and self-justifications

While acknowledging research limitations can be challenging, a candid and unbiased discussion of them exhibits scientific integrity and promotes academic progress. However, few studies have examined how writers across different disciplines might acknowledge and justify limitations in their research articles (RAs) in similar or divergent ways. This study, therefore, aims to analyze how RA writers from different fields self-report and justify limitations and how they use metadiscourse to rhetorically mediate these discussions. Drawing on the sentence-level annotations of limitation steps and corpus-based concordance of stance and engagement markers in the corpus of 400 RAs sampled from four disciplines—History, Management, Biology and Medicine—the study identified significant differences in the ways that scholars managed to maintain study transparency and legitimize limitations. Statistical and textual analyses revealed notable cross-disciplinary differences in the discussion of limitations pertaining to internal and external validity, and self-justifications regarding future research prospects, follow-up measures and situ-constraints. There were also discrepancies in the use of stance markers between pure and applied disciplines, and divergences in the use of engagement markers between soft and hard sciences. The observed variability reflects the distinct knowledge practices, epistemological orientations, levels of authorial intrusion and reader awareness across disciplines.