Writing for publication in four disciplines : Insights into text and context

Sammanfattning: Scholars globally are under increasing pressure to publish in international, highly-ranked, and usually English-language journals. This has created a need for insights into the evolving discourses, genres, and publication practices of disciplinary discourse communities. This thesis reports an exploration of textual and contextual facets of writing for publication in the academy. More specifically, the overarching aim was to investigate the relationship between discipline, and the rhetorical features, genres, languages and dissemination outlets used by scholars. The thesis comprises four qualitative studies, and employs a variety of methods to explore this relationship across four disciplines: anthropology, history, linguistics and pure mathematics. The results reveal some connections between epistemological characteristics of the disciplines investigated and scholars’ rhetorical choices. The structure of the research article in pure mathematics is shown to reflect the process of knowledge construction in the discipline, and patterns of self-mentions in anthropology and history articles are attributed to disciplinary methodology. Furthermore, insights into the relationship between discipline, and genre use, language selection, and access to publication outlets are obtained. The results reveal disciplinary differences in terms of scholars’ opportunities to publish in the local language and in English. Based on my findings, I argue that while discipline is a significant factor in understanding how scholars construct and disseminate their research-based writing, these practices are also subject to local, international and digital developments. As such, the relationship between discipline, genre, language and publication should be understood as dynamic.