Citation practices and textual borrowing strategies among expert and novice academic writers

Abstract

Citing various source texts and incorporating them appropriately and effectively in one’s own writing is a crucial feature of academic writing. Successful and efficient application of citations demands advanced levels of academic literacy and sophisticated understanding of accumulated knowledge in the field which readily pose challenges to beginning academic writers. Inappropriate and inaccurate use of citations may unjustifiably lead inexperienced writers to fall into the traps of plagiarism. Citation preferences have been shown to be discipline-specific and the practices and strategies employed by senior members of the discipline have largely remained occluded. Novice academic writers could perhaps benefit from studying the citation practices and strategies commonly employed by expert writers in their field. A case study was thus designed to investigate the citation and textual borrowing strategies of expert and novice research writers who belong to the same research community. A total of six published journal articles written by expert members and seven unpublished research papers written by research students of the same research group in chemical engineering were collected to form a corpus. In total, 402 citations were identified with the density of 9.26 citations per 1000 words in the experts’ papers and 7.57 in the novices’ papers. To study the citation practices employed, all citations used were categorized into different types and functions and compared between both sub-corpora. To analyze the textual borrowing strategies, the citations employed in the Introduction sections of the research papers were identified as paraphrases, summaries, generalizations, and exact copying, and the citations were matched and compared with the original source texts. The findings demonstrated that the novice writers mainly used citations in isolation, mainly to attribute while the experts synthesized various sources and strategically employed citations to provide support and justify their claims. The experts also used citations more succinctly with identification function and made greater use of non-integral citation. The findings on textual borrowing strategies in the novice writers’ sub-corpus revealed various problems in source use and source documentation. These were manifest in unsuccessful paraphrases, inaccurate summaries and misrepresented generalizations. The novices were also found to be too dependent on the source texts where they used more paraphrases and extensive citations. In contrast, when borrowing texts of others, expert writers employed more summaries than generalizations, and they rarely used paraphrases. The findings were further supported and enriched by semistructured interviews with six writers about their texts. The results of this study provide better understanding of expert and novice writers’ citing behavior and offered various pedagogical implications for advanced academic writing courses.