The Distribution of Authorial Presence in Experimental Psychology Articles

Abstract

Traditionally, teachers, prescriptive grammars, and writing guides have imposed the use of impersonal style in scientific writing. And indeed, in scientific papers, authorial presence is frequently hidden behind passive forms or the personification of the text or experiment. Other times, however, the author surfaces primarily by means of singular or, more frequently, plural first person pronouns or determiners. A few quantitative contributions dealing with overt authorial presence in experimental papers exist, but none of them focuses specifically on psychology. Therefore, the current study aims at expanding the existing literature by analysing the distribution of overt authorial presence in a corpus of experimental psychology articles. The corpus consists of 43 articles (298,332 running words), divided by move; each sentence in the corpus was manually tagged to identify the step it performs. Hypothetically relevant key words (I, me, my, myself, we, us, our, ourselves, author, authors, author’s) were used as starting points for the identification of distributional patterns. The data were analysed quantitatively, in order to highlight: the distribution across files of each of the selected key words; their general distribution in the corpus; their distribution across moves and steps; the most frequent relevant moves in which they appeared per section; and their most frequent collocates per section.