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REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1515323
This article is part of the Research Topic Demystifying Academic Writing in Higher Education: A Process View on Academic Textual Production View all 6 articles
Citation Practices in Applied Linguistics: A Comparative Study of Chinese Expert and Novice Authors
Provisionally accepted- 1 School of Humanities and Laws, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, Tianjin Municipality, China
- 2 Peking University, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
Citation practices are crucial in academic discourse for both knowledge construction and interpersonal interaction. While prior research in academic English has explored citation practices among expert and novice authors, there is a notable gap in studies focusing on Chinese academic papers. Moreover, it remains uncertain whether insights from English-language corpora can be extrapolated to other linguistic contexts. This study presents a comparative analysis of citation practices among expert and novice authors within the field of Chinese Applied Linguistics. Utilizing a corpus of 715,000 Chinese words, we analyzed academic papers authored by both groups. Our findings reveal that citation practices between expert and novice authors are largely comparable. Specifically, integral citations were more prevalent than non-integral citations, with the cited authors predominantly occupying the subject position. In terms of citation form, the four types employed, in descending order of frequency, were summary, block quote, generalization, and quote. The analysis of reporting markers showed a predominance of discourse markers, followed by research markers, with cognitive markers being the least frequent. Notably, novice authors demonstrated certain deficiencies compared to their expert counterparts, including an overreliance on integral citations, a reduced use of generalization and block quote citations, and limited integration of information regarding reporting markers.
Keywords: Chinese applied linguistics, citation practices, expert authors, novice authors, Academic writing
Received: 22 Oct 2024; Accepted: 24 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gong, Liu and Ji. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ruoxi Liu, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, Beijing Municipality, China
Chuanbo Ji, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, Beijing Municipality, China
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