Citation practices and ELF writing: a comparison between Italian- and English-speaking academics publishing in English

Citation practices have become a popular area of research in written academic discourse. Much attention has been devoted to this issue from a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural/cross-linguistic perspective. A related area of research that has received scholarly attention is the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in academic texts written by non-native English-speaking writers from different linguistic/cultural backgrounds. The present paper sets out to contribute to this research field, focusing
on a small corpus of final drafts of unpublished research papers written in English as a Lingua Franca by Italian academics, taken from the SciELF corpus (created at the University of Helsinki, Finland). This corpus is contrasted with a corpus of published articles written by native English-speaking academics. The aim of this investigation is to study whether there
are differences in citation practices between Italian academics’ articles and their Anglophone colleagues’ counterparts. The methodology adopted for this study combines a discourse and a corpus perspective. The comparison between ELF and native English citation forms points to similar tendencies rather than highly conspicuous differences.