How do we make ourselves heard in the writing of a research article? A study of authorial references in four disciplines

This study examined the use of personal (exclusive first-person plural pronouns) and impersonal (abstract rhetors, periphrastic passives and it-clauses) authorial references in a corpus of 160 research articles in applied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering and chemistry. The aim was to see if personal and impersonal authorial references, as realized by the rhetorical options chosen, are predisposed to differences across...