Building Consensus in Science: Resources for Intertextual Dialog in Biology Research Articles

This paper reports on the way article writers bring prior texts into biology research articles. It studies the functional moves in which citations occur and their formal features, providing a better understanding of the linguistic resources that are used to construct intertextuality in science. The results show the functions of citations were strongly associated with the rhetorical moves in which they occurred and with particular sections of the research article, although citations providing background information occurred in all the sections. The study also found that integral citations were preferred in the more argumentative moves. Self citations occurred in all moves, suggesting the relevance of networking not only with others' research but also with the authors' own previous studies. These findings may be useful in academic writing courses addressed to non-native English speakers, who need to be made aware of the specific language resources available for the construction of consensus in science to become successful writers. (Contains 4 tables.)