Citation analysis: a multidisciplinary
perspective on academic literacy
Nigel Harwood
Dept of Language &
Linguistics
email nharwood@essex.ac.uk
Abstract:
The acquisition of academic
literacy for students of English is problematic. One of the reasons for this is
that academic writing is, in Theresa Lillis’ (1999) words, ‘an institutional
practice of mystery’, poorly understood by students and lecturers alike. The
act of citation is particularly underexplored by
researchers and practitioners of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Work on
explaining the phenomena of citation and attribution in academic texts has been
carried out in three fields, Information Science, Sociology of Science, and Applied
Linguistics. While an Applied Linguistics perspective highlights similarities
and differences between the writer's use of direct/indirect and
integral/non-integral quotations, this paper focuses on the Information Science
and Sociology of Science literature which is perhaps less well known to TESOL
theorists and practitioners. Information Scientists and Sociologists show how
citation can be viewed from either a normative or social constructionist
perspective. The normative model sees acknowledging others as an act of
dispensing credit, putting on record the debt the writer owes their colleagues
for borrowing ideas or results. In contrast, the social constructionist model
claims that citing helps the writer make their paper more persuasive. I explore
these two perspectives by qualitatively analyzing a corpus of physics articles,
and argue that the writers’ citations can be interpreted according to the
normative or social constructionist models. In fact the citations can be seen
to fulfill both functions simultaneously, as they help the writer create a
research space, foreground the novelty and methodological soundness of
analysis, and confer disciplinary legitimacy upon the writer by linking them
with well-established figures in their field. The paper ends by arguing that a
corpus-based approach to citation analysis will help EAP teachers promote a
type of academic literacy which inducts learners into some of the social
practices which are part of the act of academic writing itself.
[This
article appears in: M. Baynham, A. Deignan, & G. White (eds.), Applied Linguistics at
the Interface.