ABSTRACT
Reference to prior research is almost a defining feature of the academic research article. Even the most original paper integrates and represents ideas, concepts, findings, and theories from o ther sources and, indeed, would be unlikely to reach publication if it did not. Specifically, such reporting re presents in a new situation the way language was used in a previous context,, and is defined for my purposes here as the attribution of propositional conten t to another source. Its im portance in academic discourse lies in pro viding an appropriate context of persuasion, dem onstrating how the curren t work builds on and reworks past utterances to establish intertextual links to the wider discipline. Put simply, academic writing depends for its success on situating curren t work in a larger disciplinary narrative (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Hyland, 2000; Myers, 1990). W ithout such links academics could neither justify their argum ents by connecting their research activities to significant work in the field, nor use this disciplinary knowledge to estab lish the novelty of their position (Gilbert, 1976; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995).
