ABSTRACT
Academic citation is the mechanism which both demonstrates the advance of knowledge and distributes credit for priority, emphasizing that research is embedded in a literature and that writers are linked into wider social networks. Citations are the currency of the scholarly economy and having one’s work recognized and referenced by others is an increasingly valued commodity in today’s fiercely competitive academic world. Citation is a key way of integrating claims into current knowledge, either by situating the new work in the scaffolding of accredited facts, or by challenging those facts to carve out a novel position. The tension between originality and rhetorical accommodation contributes to the collaborative construction of knowledge by negotiating novelty against what is widely accepted. The chapter presents the changes in the types of reporting, with the most significant results being an overall decline in structures which contain reporting verbs and a shift to a preference for generalization, neutral stances, discursive representation and present tense citing.
