Citation in business management research articles

Citation is a common, recurrent feature of written academic discourse in general and of research articles in particular. It has been found that different disciplinary discourse communities develop particular citation conventions (Hyland 1999, 2000, 2002). It is believed, however, that not only the discipline but also the language in which the RA is written and the cultural context within which the RA is published, might influence the use made of citations. Hence, this paper investigates citation conventions in RAs from a single discipline, business management, written in two languages, American English and Spanish, published in two different socio-cultural environments. The aim of this paper is to carry out a contrastive analysis of (i) the frequency of use of citations, (ii) their distribution across the different moves of a RA, (iii) the type of citation (non-integral vs. integral), and (iv) the use of reporting structures. Both similarities and differences were found between the citation practices of American and Spanish scholars. It can be inferred from this that whereas the rhetorical similarities can be discipline-bound, the differences are to be seen as language and culture-driven and should be best explained in terms of the different socio-cultural contexts in which the RAs composing the corpus were produced and distributed.