Citation Analysis and Discourse Analysis Revisited

Abstract

John Swales's 1986 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis’ was written by a discourse analyst to introduce citation research from other fields, mainly sociology of science, to his own discipline. Here, I introduce applied linguists and discourse analysts to citation studies from information science, a complementary tradition not emphasized by Swales. Using replicable biblio‐metric techniques, I show that interdisciplinary ties have grown among citation researchers from discourse analysis, sociology of science, and information science in the years since Swales wrote. Key authors, journals, articles, and books are presented in tables based on cocitation data from the Institute for Scientific Information. While theoretical integration of the different strands of research is far from complete, this article carries the effort forward by reviewing contributions from the 1970s to the present in three major lines of research: citation classification, content analysis of citation contexts, and studies of citer motivations. I pay particular attention to ideas that bear on teaching the art of citing—for example, in courses in English for research purposes—and to controversies in citation research of interest to discourse analysts.

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