Integrative vs . Non-Integrative Citations among Native and Nonnative English Writers

This study investigates citation practices among native and nonnative English writers. Five Master EFL theses written by Arab EFL learners were compared to 5 Master EFL theses written by native speakers of English. Adopting Swales’ (1990) categorization, the employed citation patterns were analyzed and categorized into two types: integral and non-integral. The study revealed that the nonnative English writers used more integral-verb and non-integral citations than the native English writers. However, it was found that the native English writers used the noun-phrase citation type more frequently than did the nonnative writers. The findings conclude that Arab EFL learners lack the writing and research skills needed to use all citations types effectively.


Introduction
The term citation generally refers to "a reference to a resource" (Szypszak, 2011, p. 315).However, some researchers define citation with reference to their various functions.For example, Harwood (2009) points out that citations help authors justify the topic of their research; the method/methodology employed; and/or the authors' claims.While Harwood stresses the supportive function of citations, Statsky (2009) emphasizes the signposting function as he refers to citation as an address which enables interested persons to find what has been cited.Signposting citations has several functions, such as referring readers to other sources, helping less informed readers, keeping the argument on track, and saving space (Harwood, 2009).In this definition, the suggestive function of citations is stressed.Harwood considers citation as the building function in which the building citations use sources, methods or ideas as foundations to be developed further.Finally, the credit function is a term used to refer to the situation when the citation is used to credit other authors for ideas or methods, and this method is very important to avoid plagiarism.Similarly, Van Noorden (2010) states that citations enable authors to acknowledge their intellectual debts.Based on previous literature, citation is thus a practice of referring to a source to credit an author and/or support an argument, signpost information to retrieve a document or develop further research.
Although citations are attached to journal articles, they can normally be found in books, business documents, MA, MSc and PhD theses, web articles, newspaper and magazine articles.It is true that the number of citations does not measure the quality of the journal article; however, it indicates the utility of the paper by other researchers in the relevant filed, and it is used to measure its impact.
Researchers divided citation into integral and non-integral based on the syntactic position of the name of the cited author (e.g., Swales, 1990;Thompson and Tribble, 2001).Pioneering the study of citation analysis from an applied linguistic perspective, Swales (1981Swales ( , 1990) created clear distinctions between non-integral and integral citation forms.The former are citations that are outside the sentence, usually placed within brackets, and which play no explicit grammatical role in the sentence, while the latter are those that play an explicit grammatical role within a sentence.As the name suggests, integral citations integrate the name of the cited author within the paragraph.It is integrated, as Swales (1990) points out, by using an integral-verb or by using a noun phrase.An example of integral verb citation is the citation of the author named Swales in the previous sentence.It is considered integral citation because it is integrated within this paragraph by using an integral-verb, points out.
The other type of integral citation is integrating the name of the author by using a noun-phrase.This type is commonly referred to as integral-naming as described by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011).An example of this type is the citation used in the previous sentence in which the names of the authors Mansourizadeh and Ahmad are integrated into this paragraph by occupying the position of a noun phrase.In non-integral citation, by contrast, the name of the author is not integrated within the paragraph (Thompson and Tribble, 2001).It is introduced by mentioning the name between brackets without using any integral verbs or occupying a noun phrase position as shown in the citation of Thompson and Tribble in the previous sentence.
Further elaboration of this classification is introduced by Thompson and Tribble (2001) and Thompson (2005), who divided integral and non-integral citations into sub-types, based on the analysis of a corpus of 16 doctoral dissertations.According to their categorization, integral citations are divided into: a) verb controlling (if the citation controls a lexical verb); b) naming (where the citation is a noun phrase or its part); and c) non-citations (where the author's name is not followed by other data, such as publication year).
Non-integral citations, however, are further divided into five categories: a) source, or attribution citations, which indicate where the idea or information is taken from; b) identification citations, which identify an actor in the sentence, as in ''It has been suggested (Wilson, 1999)…''; c) origin citations, which indicate ''the originator of a concept, technique or product'' (Thompson, 2001, p. 105), as in ''The CPE procedure (Kim, 1985) Applied linguists investigated native and nonnative speakers' citation practices.Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) found that citation practices differ among nonnative experts and novice writers, which they attributed to their experience gap.Expert writers usually use sophisticated processes to show their own findings in relations to earlier contributions, while novice writers lack these advanced skills.Shanmugam (2009) conducted a study on citation practices among trainee teachers in Malaysia and found that most citations were inconsistent or missing.The findings suggest that teachers should expose themselves to a lot of references and avoid citation errors.On the other hand, Kushkowski (2005) shows that web citation is extremely rare in graduate levels.
Research shows that citation patterns are affected by some factors.For example, online journals have had impact on citation patterns, and that researchers were citing more online journals than printed ones (De Groote, 2008).Salmi and Dervin (2009) investigated citation practices used by Spanish and American scholars in business management.They found that Spanish writers used less citation, especially in the discussion part; they rarely used reporting structures and did not refer to previous work.Such differences were attributed to different cultural contexts.Citations are usually more frequent in research articles and in literature review portions of texts (Martinovic-Zic, 2004).Moed (2005) found that American authors excessively cite other American colleagues, which can lead to bias in the selection of articles and references.Students may also use (over) citing to show their teachers that they have read a lot of references, and to get better grades (Harwood, 2010).
Another line of research examined citation practices in MSc theses.For instance, Borg (2000) studied an initial, non-assessed assignment written by sixteen NS and NNS post-graduate students in Education.His findings indicate that both native speakers and nonnative speakers have difficulties in the conventions and underlying complexities of incorporating source material; nonetheless, these difficulties may be provoked for nonnative speakers by cultural factors, such as their language background.Borg's results entail that the nonnative speakers were less skilled in establishing textual voice, especially in citations from secondary sources, where the multiple layering involved proved particularly challenges.
Another interesting research area in relation to the investigation of citation practices at undergraduate level is Oppenheim and Smith's (2001), which examined 60 final year projects at Loughborough University.They found that web citation was very popular in the undergraduate level.Petrić (2007) examined the rhetorical function of citations in master theses, as related to their success in terms of grade.He examined eight rhetorical functions, namely, attribution, exemplification, further reference, statement of use, application, evaluation, establishing links between sources, and comparison of one's own work with that of other authors.The study revealed that attributing information or activity to an author was found predominant.However, the findings suggest that the use of citation for non-attributive functions was considerably lower in the low-rated theses than in the high-rated theses, both in the whole theses and in individual chapters, thus identifying a possible connection between citation function and success.
Citation across disciplines was discussed in recent studies.Hyland (1999) and Thompson (2000) investigated two different genres of academic writing.Hyland looked at citations in a corpus of 80 research articles, composed of 10 journal articles from different disciplines, while Thompson (2000) examined differences in citation practices in a corpus of doctoral theses.The latter corpus contains 16 theses written in two departments at the University of Reading, 8 theses from the Department of Agricultural Botany, and 8 from the Department of Agricultural and Food Economics.The corpus shows firstly that there is considerable variation in citation practice between the different disciplines, with Philosophy being the only discipline that prefers the integral form over the non-integral, greater emphasis being placed on the arguments of different individuals.Secondly, it is interesting to note that in the case of the Agricultural Economics theses writers, the integral type was also preferred.
In investigating self-citation patterns in four disciplines (electronic engineering, general and internal medicine, organic chemistry and plant sciences), Davarpanahand and Farzaneh (2009) found that self-citation was used more in the field of organic chemistry.Hutson's findings (2006) suggest that Archaeologists cite themselves more often than sociocultural anthropologists.He found that older authors cite themselves more than younger ones.Because older authors usually have published more work, they cite their previous studies.In the medical field, De Groote et al., (2005) conducted a study to see whether medical staff depend heavily on online journals.The results showed that online journals were rarely cited and that most of the cited items were from printed journals.Citation patterns were also examined in education.For example, Budd and Magnuson (2009) found that citation practices have remained stable over time, and that there was consistency in citation patterns across the three investigated journals (Research in Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, and Journal of Higher Education).
Studies on citations have focused both on scholarly writing found in academic journals (Harwood, 2009;Hewings et al., 2010;Hyland, 1999Hyland, , 2000) ) as well as student writing in the form of doctoral theses (Dong, 1996;Thompson, 2000;Thompson & Tribble, 2001) and Master's dissertation (Charles, 2006;Petrić, 2007).The majority of these studies have focused on citations employed in texts produced by native English-speaking writers.Less is known, however, about citation practices in texts written by nonnative student writers (e.g.see Petrić, 2007).Furthermore, despite existing literature indicating that nonnative writers have some difficulties with respect to citation practices, there is a need for more research relevant to the Saudi EFL context that examines Saudi EFL learners' citation practices, and compares them with their native counterparts.Therefore, this study aims to examine citation practices in the native English speakers and Saudi EFL nonnative writers.Adopting Swales' typology of citation (1990), the study aims to explore the differences in citation practices and the frequency of occurrence of each citation type.The findings of the current study are expected to help emerging writers and nonnative speakers to be aware of the proper way of using citation practices to write more effectively and persuasively.More specifically, the study addresses the following questions: 1) Are there any differences between the native and nonnative English writers' citation practices?
2) Are there any differences between the native and nonnative writers' citation practices within the different theses sections (Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology and Discussion)?

Corpus
Ten EFL MA theses were used as two mini-corpora for analysis in the study under investigation (Appendixes A & B).While five of which were written by Saudi nonnative writers of English, the other five were written by native writers of English (Table 1).Based on the writers' first and family names, and the university from which the BA was obtained, it was decided whether this writer was native and nonnative writer of English.This selection was based also on the researchers' knowledge of those names.For example, the Saudi family names are known to both researchers because one of them is a Saudi and the other is an Arab who has been living there for a long time.The American first and family names are known to both researchers.For the purpose of reference when presenting the findings, the nonnative writers'' samples were coded as A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5, whereas the native writers' were coded as B1, B2, B3, B4, and B5.These theses were collected from Proquest Database.Both samples were written at American universities as shown below: The 10 theses were analyzed according to Swales' (1990) categorization of citation types: integral and non-integral citations.Integral citations were subdivided into integral-verb citation and noun-phrase citation (see section 1).These theses were analyzed in terms of the citation type used and the frequency of occurrence of each type in each thesis and in each thesis section; namely, introduction, literature review, methodology, and discussion.

Overall Use of Citation among both Native and Nonnative Writers
Table 2 below shows that the nonnative English writers used many more citations than their native counterparts (857 and 525), respectively.Another unsurprising finding is that the literature review recorded most of the citations in both the native and nonnative writers, which is due to the fact that the bulk of previous research cited in any MA or PhD theses should be in this section.It is also noticed that the native writers included most of their citations in the literature review (169) and discussion (143) sections, whereas the nonnative writers included most of their citations in the literature review (536) and methodology (144).As far as the least recorded citations, the native writers used 86 instances of citation in the methodology, whereas the nonnative writers used 73 citations in the discussion section.

Citation Types in the Introduction
As shown in Tables 3 and 4, the nonnative English writers included more citations in the theses introduction than the native English writers, 104 and 57, respectively.When writing the introduction chapter, the nonnative writers used more non-integral citations (46) than integral citations (44).
For example, they used non-integral citations like: "This conclusion asserts that native speakers of language enjoy "greater facility in demonstrating fluent, idiomatically appropriate language, in appreciating the cultural connotations of the language, and….In being the final arbiter of the acceptability of any given samples of the language" (Phillipson 1992, p. 194)" It is also noticed that the nonnative writers used more integral verbs than noun-phrase citations.Tables 3 and 4 also show that types of citation vary among individual theses.For example, Sample 1A included the highest number of citations (30), followed by Sample B1 (23).Sample A3 has not included any citation type under investigation.The most significant finding in Tables 5 and 6 is that the literature review section, when compared to other theses sections under investigation, yielded the highest number of citations of the different types.This might be attributed to the fact that most of the previous studies usually fall in this section.Another noticeable feature of these tables is that the nonnative writers used more citations than the native writers when drafting the literature review part, 536 and 169, respectively.Both native and nonnative writers included more integral verbs than noun-phrase citations.For example, the nonnative writers used integral verb citations like: 1) "Skehan (1989) introduced a general model that incorporates four areas of individual differences," 2) "Beard, Myhill, Riley & Nystrand (2009) report that research on writing is a relatively young area that has had little impact on instructional design and pedagogy." The nonnative writers used more non-integral citations than the native writers, 236 and 93, respectively.Individual writers vary in their citations.For example, Sample B2 included the lowest number of citations of all types (7), whereas the lowest in the nonnative writers' samples was that of Sample 3, which recorded 70 citations.

Citation Types in the Methodology
In the methodology part, the nonnative English writers used more citations than the English native writers, 128 and 84, respectively.As shown in Table 7 and Table 8, although both native and nonnative writers included more integral citations, the nonnative writers used more citations.Another significant finding is that the native writers used more noun-phrase citations than the nonnative writers.They included noun-phrase citations as shown below: 1) "According to Croft (1972), ESL/EFL brings to mind the situations that take place in the classroom," 2) "This resembles in part the concept of Rogers (1961) of the "fully functioning person who is in the process of becoming, but never really there." As far as the individual theses are concerned, it was noticed that Sample A1 (Nonnative) and Sample B3 (Native) theses recorded only 2 citations each.However, Sample A3 and Sample B1 registered 28 and 36 citations, respectively.

Citation Types in the Discussion
Contrary to the findings related to other MA theses sections, Table 9 and Table 10 show that the English native writers included more citations than the nonnative writers in both integral noun-phrase and non-integral types.The nonnative writers included more integral verb citations than the other types.However, the native English writers used more noun-phrase and non-integral citations than integral verbs.As far as the individual theses are concerned, it was noticed that there are differences in citation types and frequencies.For example Sample A4 (Nonnative) and Sample B5 (Native) theses recorded the highest frequencies, 29 and 53, respectively.However, Samples A3, B3 and B4 recorded the lowest citations, 1, 3 and 4, respectively.In general, the present study revealed that the nonnative English writers used more citations than the native English, writers, especially with regard to integral-verb and non-integral citation types.This implies that the nonnative speakers are not fully equipped with the linguistic competence that enables them to rephrase and add their own ideas.This might be attributed to wordiness since it is evident that the nonnative writers use more words to express themselves and their ideas (Rabab'ah, 2007).This phenomenon is evident in the MA theses under investigation.The number of pages of the MA theses written by the nonnative English writers ranged between 173 and 268, whereas the number of pages of those written by the native English writers ranged from 73 to 143.This means that the nonnatives have written almost double the amount written by the natives; consequently, the number of citations was also almost doubled.To examine this factor, citation per page was calculated.Table 11 below shows that the average number of citations used by the nonnative writers was 0.76 citations per page; while, as shown in Table 12 below, the native writers' citation was 0.89 citations per page.This means that the native English writers appeared to use more citations than the nonnative writers.

Discussion and Conclusion
One of the most prominent findings of the present research is that the literature review section included the highest number of citations.This is in line with Matinovic-Zic (2004), who found that citations are more frequent in the review of related literature.Another important finding is that the nonnative English writers used many more citations than the native English writers, 857 and 525, respectively.This could be attributed to the fact that the nonnative writers do not have more input to put into their research, which might be due to their limited linguistic resources and research skills.However, the native writers' linguistic repertoire aids them to analyze and synthesize, thus include fewer or even different citation patterns.According to Suleiman (1983, p. 129), the most noticeable problems which impede the progress of Arab students at university level may be attributed to the "inadequate mastery of the four language skills; namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing".
The study reveals that the nonnative English writers used the integral noun-phrase citation pattern less frequently (160), whereas integral verb citation and non-integral citations were employed more frequently, 336 and 361, respectively (See Table 2).This might be attributed to the difficulty level of this kind of citation among the Arab nonnative writers.Integral noun-phrase citation requires proficient speakers to restructure and cite a source correctly.Probably, due to their lack of communicative competencies, and the fact that they do not want to exert an effort and insert their input, the nonnative English writers cited a large number of sources; however, their citations lack analysis and synthesis.Research indicates that many Arab learners of English lack speaking and writing skills necessary for communication (e.g., Zughoul, 1983, Rababah, 2001, Rabab'ah, 2005).By the same token, Borg (2000) concludes that the nonnative speakers were less skilled in establishing textual voice, which entails more challenges to them.The present research indicates that the native English writers included fewer citations in most sections.The integral verb citation registered the least frequently used pattern (96), followed by integral noun phrase citation (132).
The present research also indicates that the nonnative writers included the least number of citations in the discussion, which dictates them to refer to the literature reviewed earlier to link their current research findings with those of previous research (Literature Review section).This finding suggests that the nonnative English writers lack the research skills needed.Based on one of the researchers' experience during his MA theses supervision, he noticed that many Arab EFL learners use the minimum citations in their discussion section because, as he is an Arabic native speakers, they lack experience, research skills and knowledge of how to do so.
Based on the researchers' experience in a number of Arab world universities, they can claim that the nonnative English writers usually exhibit insufficient experience in writing essays and research papers, and lack advanced writing skills compared to their native English counterparts.Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) found that expert writers usually use sophisticated processes to show their own findings in relation to earlier contributions.Furthermore, Thompson and Tribble (2001, p. 99) suggest that it is conventional in scientific writing to de-emphasize the role of the researchers, where the claim is that the human factor is not consequential.This makes the native speakers, who are considered to be more successful writers than their nonnative counterparts, use more non-integral citation and noun phrase integral citation types than verb-controlling integral citation.
Since effective use of citation requires advanced research and academic writing skills, in light of the findings of the present research, emerging writers, especially the nonnative writers, should be taught how to use citation efficiently, and strategically to be more persuasive.It is recommended that English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing textbooks and courses include how such writers may cite different resources appropriately, focusing on different citation types and advanced, sophisticated writing skills.Exercises on such practices and skills should …''; d) reference citations, which point to work containing further information; and e) example, where the cited work illustrates what is stated in the sentence.

Table 1 .
Sample MA theses

Table 2 .
Total citations in the native and nonnative English writers' theses

Table 3 .
Citations used in the introduction by the nonnative writers

Table 4 .
Citations used in the introduction by the native writers

Table 5 .
Citations used in the literature review by the nonnative English writers

Table 6 .
Citations used in the literature review by the native English writers

Table 7 .
Citations used in the methodology by the nonnative writers

Table 8 .
Citations used in the methodology by native speakers

Table 9 .
Citations used in the discussion by the nonnative writers

Table 10 .
Citations used in the discussion by the native writers

Table 11 .
Citations used by the nonnative writers per page

Table 12 .
Citations used by the native writers per page