Disciplinary and ethnolinguistic influences on citation in research articles Guangwei Hu a, * , Guihua Wang b a English Language and Literature, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616, Singapore b Foreign Language School, China West Normal University, Nanchong 637009, China Keywords: Academic writing Citation Writer stance Author/textual integration Disciplinary influences Ethnolinguistic influences abstract Citation, as an integral part of academic discourse and a signature feature of scholarly publication, has attracted much research attention. Previous research, however, has focused on several aspects of citation practices in a largely discrete fashion and addressed disciplinary and ethnolinguistic influences on citation in isolation from each other. This article reports on a study designed to investigate cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic variations of multiple citation features from the unifying perspective of Bakhtinian dia- logism. The dataset consisted of 84 research articles sampled from 12 leading Chinese- and English-medium journals of applied linguistics and general medicine. All the citations in the corpus were identified and examined in an integrative analytic framework that characterized multiple aspects of citations in terms of dialogic contraction (i.e., closing down the space for alternative views) or dialogic expansion (i.e., opening up the space for alternative voices). Quantitative and textual analyses revealed marked cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic differences in the level and type of citation-based dialogic engage- ment. These differences are interpreted in reference to the nature of cited information, epistemologies underlying cultural and disciplinary practices, ethnolinguistic norms of communication, and culturally valued interpersonal relationships. Pedagogical implica- tions derived from these findings are discussed. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Citation is a direct and explicit means of intertextuality (Bazerman et al., 2005) whereby information of various types (e.g., concepts, terminology, data, methods of inquiry, knowledge claims, and findings) is attributed to sources external to the text (Coffin, 2009; Hyland, 2002). It is a discursive practice serving myriad cognitive, epistemological, and rhetorical functions, such as establishing intellectual linkages, demonstrating paradigmatic allegiance, contextualizing research, enhancing persuasiveness, and managing interpersonal relationships (Gilbert, 1977; Latour, 1987; Paul, 2000; White & Wang, 1997). As an integral part of academic discourse and a signature feature of scholarly publication, citation has attracted much research attention in several disciplines, including applied linguistics (White, 2004). The discursive phenomenon has been investi- gated and referred to variously as academic attribution (Hyland, 1999), bibliographic reference (Fløttum, Dahl, & Kinn, 2006), citation (Bazerman, 1988), discourse representation (Fairclough, 1992), intertextuality (Salager-Meyer, 1999), referencing (Small, 2010), and reporting (Thompson & Ye, 1991). In this article, we report a study that built on previous citation research in the * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ(65) 67903484. E-mail address: guangwei.hu@nie.edu.sg (G. Hu). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of English for Academic Purposes journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap 1475-1585/$ – see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2013.11.001 Journal of English for Academic Purposes 14 (2014) 14–28