How do we make ourselves heard in the writing of a research article? A study of authorial references in four disciplines

ABSTRACT This study examined the use of personal (exclusive first-person plural pronouns) and impersonal (abstract rhetors, periphrastic passives and it-clauses) authorial references in a corpus of 160 research articles in applied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering and chemistry. The aim was to see if personal and impersonal authorial references, as realized by the rhetorical options chosen, are predisposed to differences across disciplinary rhetorical cultures. The results indicated disciplinary variations in both the frequency and use of personal and impersonal authorial references, especially when the disciplines were compared for contrasting effects. While the applied linguistics and psychology writers favoured the use of exclusive first-person plural pronouns to construct their authorial persona, the environmental engineering and chemistry writers preferred a more detached interpersonal style by opting predominantly for periphrastic passives. Also, the results showed differences in the incidence of use of personal and impersonal authorial references across discourse functions, which could be attributed to the adoption of different interpersonal strategies within the disciplines. The present results are expected to extend our understanding of disciplinary variations towards the use of authorial references in tandem with discourse functions in research articles in the selected disciplines, particularly in the relatively unexplored disciplines of chemistry and environmental engineering.