| Abstrak/Abstract |
Personal attribution plays a significant role in displaying the interaction between the authors and the readers. In this study, we examine how authors construct their identities through the use of personal pronouns. The data for the research were taken 20 research articles published in two reputable international journals: 10 research articles published in Genome Biology, and another 10 in Molecular Systems Biology. The data were analyzed with the help of WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott,2008), a concordance software that can help retrieve instances of authorial references used in research articles. A qualitative analysis was also conducted to examine the clusivity and the authorial selves expressed by first-person pronouns. The results show that a total of 2,267 instances of first-person plural pronouns or 126 instances per 10,000 words were found in the corpus. Most of these personal pronouns were used exclusively to refer to the authors of the research articles and to express the identity of the authors as the recounters of the research processes and originators of research claims. The results suggest that there seems to be a tendency for research article authors, especially in biology, to show their presence in their academic writing through the use of first-person pronouns. |
