Structural and Functional Characterization of Citation Practices in Academic Research Writing: A Concordance-Informed Analysis

In the last two decades, citation behaviour in academic research writing has been highlighted in English for academic purposes. This concordance-informed, corpus-based study has focused on cross-disciplinary analysis of citations by English and Iranian academic writers in English Economics and Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering research articles  published in international and Iranian national English-medium journals. To that end, research articles in Economics and Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering were developed and divided into four sub-corpora: English corpus and Iranian corpus. Thompson and Tribble’s (2001) classification and Thompson and Ye’s (1991) framework were used to analyse citations. The computer program AntConc (version 3.5.7) was used to identify 1,032 citations. The results of data analysis showed more frequent uses of citations by Economics than Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering writers. In terms of citation structures, more integral citations were utilised by Economics writers, and more non-integral citations were used by Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering writers. In addition, the citation analyses of native and non-native writers revealed that English writers employed more citations than Iranian writers. The findings imply that the cultural context of publication, in addition to the linguistic background and knowledge structures of their disciplines, seems to shape the writers’ citation choices when writing their research articles.