Language Testing in Focus: An International Journal

In the academic context, a citation is a fundamental aspect of academic writing that helps authors to providing strong argumentation, evaluate and express their attitude towards previous studies. This study aims to investigate the types and functions of citation in the research articles. To this end, a corpus of 60 research articles from 3 high-rank Nursing and Midwifery and Applied Linguistics journals that were written by Iranian scholars (in local journals) and international writers were selected, and their citation patterns were analysed based on Thompson and Tribble’s frameworks (2001). Then, the Chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests were run to investigate the similarities and differences in the citation patterns in the selected journals from a statistical point of view. Although the corpus-based analysis revealed that the Iranian journal articles had a higher density of citations than international journal articles, the international scholars utilised all citation patterns. The results of this study could be used effectively by EAP teachers, students, and novice scholars to improve the understanding of theoretical and practical dimensions of citation patterns in the fields of medical and humanities sciences.