Types and Functions of Citations in Master’s Theses Across Disciplines and Languages
Types and Functions of Citations in Master’s Theses Across Disciplines and Languages

Summary/Abstract: Citation is an essential and common feature of academic writing and is used by academic writers to achieve different purposes. This study investigated disciplinary variations in terms of citation practices in the genre of Master’s theses with a specific focus on discussions. To this end, sixty discussions produced by MA/MS students of two key universities in Iran from both hard and soft disciplines were analyzed in terms of citation types and functions. The medium of writing whether English or Persian was also taken into account for its probable influence on the employed citation practices. The results revealed that integral citations were used more frequently by writers in soft knowledge fields, allowing them to make evaluations, whereas non-integral citations were mostly used by hard discipline writers. As for rhetorical functions, Support and Comparison were the dominant functions in these text types. However, there existed subtle differences both in the degree and the way these writers draw intertextual links to their disciplines. The findings can be of considerable help to EAP instructors and thesis supervisors to raise their students’ awareness and refine their understanding of citation strategies in thesis writing.

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