Disciplinary and ethnolinguistic influences on citation in research articles

• Applied linguistics and medical RAs in Chinese and English are analyzed for citations.
• Applied linguistics RAs use expansive citations more frequently than medical RAs.
• Medical RAs use contractive citations more frequently than applied linguistics RAs.
• Chinese RAs exhibit less citation-based dialogic engagement than English RAs.
• Chinese and English RAs prefer contractive and expansive citations respectively.

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 dialogism. 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 engagement. 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 implications derived from these findings are discussed.