Source use in Results sections in qualitative research articles of two disciplines

Source use in research writing has been widely investigated in EAP studies with many of which targeting linguistic and rhetorical aspects of citation deemed tacit and challenging to novice writers. Using research articles (RA) as data, investigations have tended to follow a discipline-specific or cross-disciplinary comparative approach premised on the commonly held belief that each discipline is a monolithic epistemological community with its own unified research writing practices. Yet, this assumption may be counter-productive in analyzing writing in disciplines which embrace epistemological diversity – with the co-existence of quantitative, qualitative and other paradigms being a norm rather than an exception that leads to intra-disciplinary variations in discursive practices. To study citations in such domains for pedagogical insights, an epistemology-specific approach is more relevant and promising as shown by the findings of Kwan and Chan’s (2014) study of source use in the Results and post-Results sections of quantitative RAs in Information Systems.
Writers of the corpus made frequent references in the Methods and the Comments moves of the Results sections to methodological and statistical matters as a strategy to establish the scientific legitimacy of their results – a phenomenon attributable to the positivist nature of quantitative studies. Extending their line of inquiry, this paper will present a study of citations in the Results sections of qualitative RAs in Tourism and Information Systems.
The findings are markedly different from those in Kwan and Chan. Instead of citing research procedural and statistical matters, writers of both disciplines tended to cite theoretical/conceptual matters to frame their data-reporting or analysis while some also cited source language and technical notions to abstract their observations – a practice attributable to the interpretivist nature of the studies. Based on the findings, a semantic-functional citation typology will be proposed for the results sections of qualitative RAs. Pedagogical implications will also be discussed.