A Comparative Citation Study In Results & Discussion Between Chinese Master’s & Doctoral Theses And English Journal Articles

Over the past two decades, writing ability has been focused on by more and more western scholars and citation analysis in academic writing has been attracting researchers’ and scholars’ attentions. However, studies on features of citation in academic writing are hardly involved in China. Therefore, the author aims to compare citation differences in Results and Discussion sections between English empirical journal articles(by western scholars) and Chinese students’ empirical academic writings(by Chinese English-major masters and doctors).In the present study, three corpora were built up, namely, master’s theses corpus(MA), doctoral dissertations corpus(DA) and standard journal articles(JA). MA and DA consist of 20 English empirical master’s theses and 15 English empirical doctoral dissertations respectively, which were all downloaded on CNKI. JA comprises 20 English empirical journal articles from some international prestigious linguistics journals. Moreover, in the three corpora, Results and Discussion parts were reserved while the rest parts of all the academic articles were cut off. Based on Xu’s citation framework(2012), with the help of Chi-square and log-likelihood software, citation comparison between western scholars and Chinese students were carried out.The results of the study are as follows: Firstly, in citation form, non-integral was used more than integral; in citation content and strategy, the dominant category in JA is “opinion explanation” and “links & comparison” respectively. Secondly, compared to JA, MA and DA all show some differences, in particular, significance occurring in JA in citation form, lack use of “opinion explanation” in JA in content, overuse of “attribution” and lack use of “links & comparison” both in JA and DA in strategy. Thirdly, comparatively, DA is better at application of citation form and content while differences in strategy occur a little more in DA than JA.The results of the study are much of importance to students’ strengthening citation capacity and raising academic capacity and to teachers’ improving pedagogic plan for students’ improvement in academic writing in EPA class.