Stripped of Authorship or Projected Identity? Iranian Scholars’ Presence in Research Articles

Research Article (RA) genre has been a significant area of research in academic writing over past decades. However, authors’ identity in RAs has not received much attention, especially in soft sciences like applied linguistics. This paper reports a corpus analysis of Iranian writers’ authorial presence markers in RAs in the field of applied linguistics. The corpus comprised 30 RAs (200,000 words) from three peer-reviewed journals published in Iran. This study was carried out in two phases. Initially, the corpus was content-analysed for exclusive instances of authorial presence markers and then, frequency of each authorial indicator was calculated. Content analysis revealed various authorial markers used by Iranian scholars to manifest themselves in their writings, for instance, personal pronouns, self-citations, and other self-mention terms. Authorial markers varied in terms of frequency in single-authored and multiple-authored articles. Personal pronouns were found to be the most salient authorial markers. Furthermore, authors in the corpus employed authorial markers for different promotional purposes such as pursuing uniqueness in their studies and regarding themselves as prominent figures in the field. The results of this study underline the need for further research into the identities adopted by writers in their works and the whys and wherefores behind using particular identity markers rather than others. This study would be of benefit to academic writers and teachers of writing courses since it helps them discern the linguistic choices available to non-native speakers of English to manifest themselves in their writings and to gain acceptance in the discipline community.