Language Teaching Research Quarterly

Citation is an essential part of academic writing and allows writers to make strong arguments, review previous research, and express their opinions. This study investigates reporting verbs as a part of citation practice in the research articles published in Iranian and international journals (with different linguacultural backgrounds) in humanities and medical sciences from 2015-2019. In this cross-disciplinary study, 60 research articles (RAs) from Applied Linguistic (AL) and Nursing and Midwifery (NM) as part of humanities and medical sciences respectively were selected and classified based on Hyland’s (2002) frameworks. The results demonstrated that the Iranian journal articles utilised more reporting verbs (RVs) than the international journal articles whereas, the international articles used RVs with a wide variety. Although the types of verbs were different, the research verbs had a clear preference in the corpus. The finding suggests some pedagogical implications for novice scholars and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students to become familiar with differences in using RVs and select the correct choice of reporting verbs in the field of humanities and medical sciences.