Citation practices in Slovak and English linguistic research papers

Citation in research articles is an important gateway to acceptance by academic community. When citing others, scholars follow the conventions of the genre, of the academic discipline, and of their culture. This paper focuses on the cultural aspects of citation by comparing and contrasting a corpus of linguistic papers written in English and in Slovak. The results show that while English native writers prefer making their papers more objective through a higher incidence of generalisations and reporting verbs denoting the process of research, Slovak native writers opt for making the cited authors more visible by a greater amount of integral citations and reporting verbs denoting mental states and processes. A higher number of quotations, including floating quotations, suggests that Slovak scholars have a high regard for the work of others.