Changes in the ways authors refer to themselves: a diachronic study of self-mention in English research articles

Self-mention refers to the presentation and mention of writers themselves in texts. As there has been limited research on whether authors have changed the ways they refer to themselves in their English research articles, we explored whether and to what extent self-mention and its three sub-categories have changed based on a corpus of 1200 research articles from 4 disciplines spanning the period from 1970 to 2019. The findings demonstrate that self-mention and its three sub-categories in academic writing have undergone changes over time and tend to be shaped by discipline. Writers in soft science use fewer self-mentions and first-person pronouns. They tend to present themselves in a subtle way by diverting their attention from first-person pronouns by increasing the percentages of third-person nouns and abstract subjects. Conversely, writers in hard science strive to present themselves more directly via using self-mention more frequently, especially first-person pronouns. Accordingly, the percentages of third-person nouns and abstract subjects in hard sciences are decreasing. This study provides a diachronic and cross-disciplinary overview of how self-mention has changed in English research articles throughout the 50 years and offers some pedagogical implications for self-mention in English academic writing and teaching.

Hua Wang, Zhiqing Hu