Self-mentions in anthropology and history research articles: Variation between and within disciplines

•A corpus of 36 research articles (18 from history, 18 from anthropology) was compiled.•An investigation into the use of first-person subject pronouns was conducted.•‘I’ was used more frequently in the anthropology articles.•Considerable intra-disciplinary variation was observed.•An author role termed “Narrative I” is introduced.

The aim of this study was to investigate the deployment of self-mentions in 18 history and 18 anthropology published research articles. ‘I’ was used more frequently in the anthropology articles than in history articles, a finding that can be traced to the knowledge-making practices of the disciplines. However, considerable intra-disciplinary variation was also observed, both in terms of frequency of self-mentions per article and the author roles adopted via the use of the first-person subject pronoun. Based on the results, I argue that there is a need to raise students' awareness of intra-as well as interdisciplinary variation in academic discourse, particularly in the humanities.