How research space is created in a diverse research world

About a decade ago it was suggested (Belcher, 1997) that increasing diversity among professional academics writing in English, i.e., the growing presence of women and those (both men and women) from outside the Anglophone “inner circle” (Kachru, 1992), was exerting mounting pressure on established academia for greater tolerance of non-traditional, non-adversarial approaches to academic discourse. To what extent an increase in rhetorical diversity, however, has actually occurred in high-stakes, published academic writing has remained an open question. In an effort to address this question, research articles from 1996 through 2007 in three Anglophone language/literacy education journals were analyzed with attention given to the gender and cultural representativeness of the authors, and article introductions in all issues of two decade-apart volumes, 1996 and 2006, of the same journals were examined for their preferred style of argumentation, or more specifically, how they create a research space (Swales, 1990). The findings suggest improved diversity among contributors but less rhetorical diversity in their contributions than expected. Implications for second language writers whose goal is to publish in mainstream English-medium journals, and for those who wish to lend support to that goal, are discussed.