Genre Analysis

Genre Analysis: Citation and the construction of sub-disciplinary knowledge

Introduction
In Academic Writing, Giltrow introduces a new idea regarding academic writing as a practice of knowledge-making. In the process of constructing knowledge, different disciplines show diversity in the styles of writing. (Giltrow, 2009). Giltrow’s new reasoning of genre- combination of situation and forms- provides researchers a way to analyze the similarities of documents in order to compare the disciplinary differences in styles of expression. The research paper is an important example of the research genres and a typical way of constructing new knowledge in academic discourse. According to Giltrow, successful writing depends upon readers’ recognition
By analyzing citation practice, we could observe the construction of knowledge in different sub-disciplinary communities. (Hyland, 1999) There are both similarities and differences between these two subfields with regard to citation frequency and citation preference. As shown by the results, both clinical and experimental articles in the psychology discipline, which is considered as a semi-soft discipline, largely use citations. Furthermore, both subfields’ writers tended to use more non-integral citation. This observation is consistent with hyland’s claims that soft disciplines employed more citations and with a preference for non-integral citations. (Hyland, 1999) According to Hyland, citation acts as a medium to connect a writer’s argument and his or her discourse community. (P 352) The similarities of citation usage between experimental psychology and clinical psychology could be regarded as a practice of following the citation norms established by their parent discipline community. Moreover, Hyland (1999) suggests that citation conventions are influenced by the social activities, cognitive styles and epistemological beliefs of particular discipline. There is no separate expertise discourse has been set for these sub-disciplines. In other words, they exist in the same social context and possess a high
Hyland identifies that the conventions of citation reflect obvious disciplinary distinctions; for example hard disciplines (e.g., science) tend to employ more non-integral citations than soft disciplines (e.g., sociology). But equally important is that the fact that there are sub-disciplines under a core discipline possessing different contextual characteristics. Psychology as a social science discipline concerned with human behavior has been viewed as integrating knowledge from many sources and disciplines including both science and humanities. By analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data about citation behaviors in articles from both clinical and experimental psychology, this study has sought to increase our understanding of the citation practices in different sub-disciplines. The findings of this study reveal sub-disciplinary tendencies that are reflected in citation patterns of clinical and experimental psychology articles. The differences in terms of their citation preferences are worth emphasizing again. Clinical psychology articles show biased preference for non-integral citation while experimental psychology articles present alike preference for both type of citations. As mentioned earlier, this difference could because clinical psychology tends to be more scientific whereas experimental psychology could be