Exploring citations in chemical engineering literature review

Abstract

Citation is considered as an essential part in any academic writing whereby it is one way for writers to support any claims or arguments made in their study with literature from previous research. Literature review is known as a chapter which provides background for research described in a thesis. However, relatively not many studies are done on literature review chapter of thesis which may be due to the extensive nature of the text. Writing academic texts such as a thesis requires an author to acknowledge other researchers’ work through proper use of citations. Learning the appropriate way to cite is important in any kinds of academic writing especially among research students who are writing their theses. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to investigate the citation practices in doctoral theses of Chemical Engineering. The purpose of this study is two folds; i) to identify the types of citations used in the corpus (using Swale's 1990 categorization) and ii) to examine the functions related to the citations used (using Thompson's 2001 framework). Three literature review chapters were analysed first to identify the types of citations used in the mini corpus and the functions related to the citations. The results of the study show that engineering student writers mostly used Non-integral citations as compared to Integral. The study concludes with a discussion on the skills of citing the literature which should be given more attention to raise the awareness level among students.