A Contrastive Study of Rhetorical Functions of Citation in Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journals

Writing an academic article requires researchers to provide support for their works by learning how to cite the works of others. Various studies regarding the analysis of citation in M.A theses have been done, while little work has been done on comparison of citations among ELT scopus journal articles, and so the dearth of research in this area demands further investigation into citations in articles. To this aim, the researcher of the present study compares the use of citations between 60 Iranian and international ELT sopus journal articles. Citation frameworks are Petric [4] and Thompson and Tribble [3]. Each framework is further divided into sub-categories. The findings show that Iranian researchers unlike the international ones tend to use integral more than non-integral citations, according to Thomspson and Tribble’s [3] framework, indicating that they emphasize the writers rather than information. Analysis of citations based on Petric’s [4] framework demonstrates that the use of citation for non-attribution functions is found to be considerably lower in Iranian articles than in international articles. In conclusion, the study argues that functions of citations should receive more attention in ELT courses to raise the awareness level of researchers in order to avoid the practice of plagiarism.


Introduction
Citation can be considered a central issue in writing an acceptable research from various angels.Smith [1] believes that "a citation implies a relationship between a part or the whole of the cited document and a part or the whole of the citing document" (p.83).The use of citation is common in writing articles not only for the field of ESL but also all fields of study including biology, electronic engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and etc.Despite different approaches and methods in these different fields, all researchers need to know how to cite the prior publications or authors in their work, because "researcher writers do not want only to show their own credibility in research" [2] (p.91).Writing a research consists of different sections such as literature review, methodology, discussion, etc.When the writers are going to cite other scholars' works, each section of research obliges the writers to use a particular function of citation, for example in the methodology section the writers use other scholars' frameworks, questionnaires or in the result section use different formulae, writers are obliged to use particular kinds of citation in order to be suitable.Thompson and Tribble [3] state that we should sensitize students regarding the choices that are available to them when they decide to refer to other texts.
Although there are various frameworks consisting of a variety of functions regarding citation, most researchers are not aware of them and they do not tend to consider this area as crucial.This area can be known as a neglected area for academic writing on the account of dearth of researchers' knowledge.Neither the teachers nor the students have enough information regarding this problematic area.Moreover, there isn't any particular course for teaching citation.All of these factors hinder the researchers' awareness of such functions and may affect their article writing indirectly.Many researchers including Thompson and Tribble [3], and Petric [4] have worked on citation frameworks and have applied them in many different fields of study, and Jalilifar and Dabbi [2] have conducted a research in Iran about the analysis of citation in introduction section of various theses from three different universities.However, most of these researches concentrate on citation and frameworks, there seems to be no comparative work between the articles of Iranian and international scopus journals.
The result of the present study can guide researchers into the correct path, and make them be aware of the complexity of citation functions in order to use them accurately.The correct use of citation leads them to be "against literacy piracy" [2] (p.91).The main purpose of this study is to observe the differences and similarities between Iranian and international ELT scopus journals in terms of citation.
The study therefore addressed the following research questions: Q1: Is there any significant difference between Iranian and international ELT scopus journals in terms of rhetorical functions of citation?
Q2: What types of rhetorical functions of citation are used more often in Iranian and international ELT scopus journals?Q3: Is there any significant difference between frequencies of rhetorical functions of citation use and articles sections in Iranian and international ELT scopus journals?

Definition of Citation
There are numerous definitions regarding citation and types of it.This paper refers to some of them as follow: For example, Jalilifar and Dabbi [2] defined citation as a reference to other works, findings, and results.They make references to the others' works in order to frame and support their own work and also to establish a gap for themselves within their special discourse community.As Ziman (1968) observes, a scientific paper does not stand alone; it is inserted in the literature of the subject (cited in Smith [1], 1981)."A reference is the acknowledgment that one document gives to another; a citation is the acknowledgment that one document receives from another" (Smith [1], p. 83).According to the American Psychological Association [5], citation means ones cite the ideas, theories, or researches of scholars whose works have influenced your research.

Smith's Assumptions
Smith [1] suggests some assumptions regarding the roles that citations play as follow: 1. Citation of a document implies use of that document by the citing author This assumption is included by two parts.The first part is that author refers to all the documents or some of them which are more important.The second part is that author refers to those documents that contribute to writer's own works.Failure to meet these two conditions leads to "sins of omission and commission": certain documents are underrated in a way that not all items used were cited, and other documents are overrated because not all items cited were used.
The principal of this assumption in the use of citation as displaying the quality is that there is a high positive correlation between the numbers of citations which a particular document (author, journal, etc.) receives and the quality of that document (author, journal, etc.).

Citations are made to the best possible works
Familiarity with the population which researchers select, let them have a better understanding of their nature.If one supposes that citations are made to the best possible works, "then one must imagine that authors sift through all of the possible documents that could be cited and carefully select those judged best" (p.88).

4.
A cited document is related in content to the citing document; if two documents are bibliographically coupled, they are related in content; and if two documents are co-cited, they are related in content.
"To the extent that citation indexes can be used to retrieve relevant citing documents given a cited document, one has support for the first part of this assumption" (p.89).

All citations are equal
Predominantly, studies using citation suppose that all citations (with the possible exception of self-citations) can be ratted equally.

Citation Frameworks
Efforts to accomplish the classification of citations left different typologies; White [6] noted that over 20 different typologies had been devised by 2003."This variation can be attributed to different aspects of citation use the typologies were intended to capture as well as to disciplinary and generic differences of the corpora analyzed" [4] (p. 240).Citation typologies include two subsections in general, content-based typologies and typologies based on formal criteria.To form a content-based typology obliges the knowledge of the topic and reliability which results in a double-rating procedure.A well-known example is the Moravcsik and Murugesan [7], which consists of four sets of contrasting features of citations.
"Each citation is classified along the four dimensions as either: conceptual or operational, organic or perfunctory, evolutionary or juxtaposition, and confirmative or negational" [7] (p.88).Petric [4] mentioned that "the subsequent uses of this typology have shown, as is the case with many citation typologies, that not all of the categories are applicable to other disciplines" (p.240).Swales [8], for instance, found that the first two criteria were irrelevant in the case of texts in applied linguistics.
Formal typologies overcome this shortcoming by "focusing on the linguistic realization of citations, i.e., their surface forms rather than their meaning" and actually does not need the researcher to be well-familiar with the discipline; "they typically employ corpus linguistic methods and can therefore be used with large corpora" (p.240).The most frequently used is the distinction introduced by Swales [9] between integral and non-integral citations, on the one hand, and reporting and non-reporting, on the other hand.
The present study used two main frameworks which were proposed by Thompson and Tribble [3] and Petric [4].The following sections include the details regarding the frameworks, definitions, and different examples.

Thompson and Tribble's [3] Frameworks
To complete the work of Swales [9], Thompson [10,11] divided integral and non-integral citations into sub-types, based on the analysis of a corpus of 16 doctoral dissertations in two disciplines: agricultural botany and agricultural and food economics.
According to Thompson and Tribble [3], non-integral citations were divided into four categories and integral ones include three categories as follow:

NON-INTEGRAL CITATION
With a non-integral reference the author's name appears outside the structure of the sentences, separated from the text, and has no syntactic role.e.g.Increased awareness of the dangers of a high fat diet have led to a rise in the sale of fresh vegetables in the local supermarkets (Chen, 1997, p. 62).
The following subsections comprise the non-integral citation: a) Source Source indicates where the idea or information is taken from.It may be a statement as a report regarding some facts or the attribution of an idea to another, as in this example: e.g.Further support for CF types other than recasts comes from sociocultural theory, according to which learning involves moving away from other-repair toward more reliance on self-repair (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994)

b) Identification
The second type of non-integral citation identifies an agent and actor within the sentence it refers to.An example of this is e.g.While there are several identity-focused analyses of L2 classroom talk (e.g.Harkla, 2000;Duff, 2002;Pomerantz, 2008;Talmy, 2008) c) Reference This type of citation is usually signaled by the inclusion of the directive "see", referring to work containing further information as in: e.g.Research on CF preferences is important, as it informs practitioners of learners' perspectives and subsequently, may lead to more effective teaching practice when combined with results from, the CF effectiveness research (see also Basturkmen, Loewen & Ellis, 2004)

d) Origin
The originator of product, method, concept is cited according to this kind of citation, as in: e.g.In applied linguistics more generally, two recent issues of the AILA Review of the International Association of Applied Linguistics on 'Africa and Applied Linguistics' (Makoni & Meinhof, 2003) and 'World Applied Linguistics' (Gass & Makoni, 2004) have begun to broaden the scope of the field.

INTEGRAL CITATIONS
An integral reference includes the author's name in the structure of your own text whereas the year is between the parentheses.

And research by Chen (1997) suggests that …
A clear distinction can be made between integral citations which control a lexical verb (Verb controlling) and those that do not (Naming).A third type is the reference to a person that is not a full citation --this has been called a Non-citation form (p. 95).

a) Verb Controlling
If the citation controls a verb, in active or passive voice, is verb controlling.

e.g. Sheen & Ellis (2011) also distinguish between conversational and didactic recasts b) Naming
In this function, citation is included in noun phrase or a part of it.This function is somehow similar to verb-controlling function in a way that it refers to works done by particular researchers.Look at the following example: e.g.A good example of this is Römer's (2010) discussion of the frames it would be to, which is typically completed by adding an evaluative adjective c) Non-citation The reference is cited in this type without the following data particularly the year.It is most commonly used when the reference has been supplied earlier in the text and the writer does not want to repeat it.For example: e.g.According to Kivinen, the four main strategy categories (See Figure 1) are interrelated and interact with one another Petric [4] aimed to identify the relationship between the types of citation and high-and low-rated master's theses.The corpus used in that study consisted of 16 master's theses (eight A-graded theses and eight lower-graded theses), written by second language writers from 12 countries in Central and Eastern Europe.She used Thompson's (2001) classification of citation types (attribution or source, origin, reference, and example) with some modifications to classify both integral and non-integral citations.A total of 1981 citations were identified in 310'624 words, of which 1253 were in the high-rated theses (182'896 words) and 729 in the low-rated ones (127'728 words), referring to greater citation density in high-rated theses with more syntactic and rhetorical complexities.The reason that two frameworks were used in the present study was that they completed each other.Some of the functions were not present in Thompson and Tribble's [3] framework while Petric's [4] framework which modify and complete the previous one, did include that functions.
The second framework that was used in this study consists of nine rhetorical functions.Each function is illustrated with an authentic example from the corpus as follow: a) Attribution This type of citation is similar the function of source citation mentioned in Thompson and Tribble's [3] framework.
Here is an example of an integral non-reporting citation used for attribution: e.g.According to Burns, Roe, and Ross (1999, p. 219), literal comprehension is to take in ideas that are directly stated, i.e. the most basic type

b) Exemplification
The information always precede or follow the citation by the terms 'for example, or 'such as', or 'e.g.'Both integral and non-integral citations can under this function.The following sentence illustrates the function of exemplification along with integral.
e.g.Nunan (1997, p. 201), for example, argued that his model illustrated "how autonomy can be a normal, everyday addition to regular instruction".

c) Further reference
Only non-integral citation is used for his function.It occurs in parentheses or a footnote and preceded by the word 'see'.Pay attention to the following example: e.g.Although many similar expressions can be found across languages, many more do not coincide exactly in their linguistic or semantic meaning and use (see Laufer, 2000;Liontas, 2001;Zarei & Koosha, 2003).

d) Statement of use
According to Petric [4] this type of citation is used to state what works are used in the research and for what purposes."It is found either in introductions and introductory paragraphs in chapters as a statement of prospective use" (p.244).The following example shows "the statement of use" function while plays the role of non-citation function of Thompson and Tribble [3].

e.g. To clarify the format of citation I have relied on categorization of Hunter which tells that citation can appear within the text (in-text citation), at the bottom of the page (footnotes), or at the end of the paper (endnotes e) Application
This type of citation makes connections between the cited and the writer's work in order to use the arguments, concepts, terminology or procedures from the cited work for the writer's own purposes.The focus is therefore on the writer's work (p.244) e.g.In other words I can conclude that, using Engelhardt, et. al,'s (2006) term, RA writers are notably Gricean.

f) Evaluation
We evaluate the works of other authors in this type of citation.We express our appraisal with evaluative language (e.g., evaluative adverb) whether it may be positive or negative attitude.Here is an example of positive evaluation: e.g.Elizabeth Grosz's concept of ''the body as inscriptive surface'' is an ingenious way out of the nature/culture impasse (p.245).

g) Establishing links between sources
The function of this citation is to point to links, usually comparison and contrast, between or among different sources used.
Here is an example of integral citation along with establishing links between two sources: e.g.Like Macken-Horarik and Morgan (2011), among many others, the analysis was confined to a small number of texts and genres, but following Christie and Derewianka (2008) it explored multiple dimensions within these This category is used when the relation between the citing and cited document is not obvious.Here is an example from a thesis on women in prison, which uses citation to a work on qualitative research methods: e.g.What are the central research questions about women inmates, and what are the appropriate methods to be used in answering these questions?(Steward, 1994) (as cited in Petric, 2007, p. 246) Petric [4] believes that by scrutinizing the sentences consisting citations, it is made clear that citations may have potential overlaps between the categories.For example, most of the sentences which define an item is clearly 'attribution' while it may indicates another function when it is playing the role of application.Petric [4] continues that is it important to consider the overlaps because "keeping this category separate allows us to identify instances where a source is cited with no immediate rhetorical purpose other than to present information from it"(p.246)."

Materials and Methods
The corpus that was used in this study consisted of 60 articles from different scopus journals in the domain of English Language Teaching.Thirty articles from three Iranian ELT scopus journals were selected.All these thirty journals were written by foreign language writers.From each journal ten articles were selected -Journal of English Language Teaching and Learning (JELTL) of Tabriz University, Journal of Teaching Language Skills (JTLS) of Shiraz University, and Journal of Teaching English Language (TELL) and Literature Society of Iran.Another thirty articles were selected from International ELT scopus journals.The numbers for each journal were ten and therefore the same as Iranian ones.The same numbers of journal articles were selected in order to have a more objective outlook.The titles of international journals were English Language Teaching (ELT) Journal, English for Specific Purposes, and Journal of Language, Identity, and Education.All the writers of these articles were second language writers.As Jalilifar and Dabbi [2] asserted that generic and rhetorical structures are subject to variation across time, then the present study selected those articles which were published between 2010 and 2013.In carrying out the study, one of the thorny problems was accessing scopus articles from different journals, which resulted in the investigation of different databases.

Instrument
In this study, two frameworks were used.The first one is Thompson and Tribble's [3] framework for integral and non-integral citations which were used as the instrument to analyze and compare the materials.The main categories which Thompson and Tribble [3] set are as follow: a) integral citation consisting of three sub classes; b) non-integral citation consisting of four sub-categories.Thompson and Tribble's [3] classification assumed to be comprehensive and it takes accounts of all the citations types (see section 1.3.1.for more details).The second framework used in this study was driven from [4] (see section 1.3.2.) who compared rhetorical citation functions in eight high-and eight low-graded master's theses in the field of gender studies.The following rhetorical functions of citations are identified: 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 (see section 1.3.2. for more details).

Data Collection and Analysis
After grouping the articles, the citation function types were analyzed through a checklist based on the frameworks mentioned earlier (See section 1.3.).While counting the number of citations in each part, the relationship between the function of citation and articles' sections was examined thoroughly as well.The first step in the analysis of citation types in ELT scopus journals was to run a word count to determine the length of the corpus.After analysis, the number and percentage of citation were calculated.The identified data based on Thompson and Tribble [3] and Peric's [4] frameworks were classified according to the citation functions.The number and kinds of citation used in each part of the articles were counted as well.A table was used to show the number and percentages of citation for Iranian and international scopus journals.Another table along was used to display the comparison and contrast between the Iranian and the international scopus journals.Another table was also used to display the types of citations used and their relationships with different articles sections.The analysis also included textual elements outside the main text, such as epigraphs and explanatory footnotes.The frameworks that were used in the study were both functional, allowing us to look at the contextual nature of citations, and formal, divulging the syntactic position of citations within the clause.Thus, the present study provided analyses at both quantitative and qualitative levels.At the end, by scrutinizing the gathered data it was determined whether a relationship exists among Iranian and international ELT scopus journals and citation type and article section respectively.It should be stated that to ensure more objectivity in the analysis, preliminary analysis was made on ten research articles in ELT (five from each language).Two other researchers also analyzed the articles separately and agreement was then reached on rhetorical functions assigned to each citation.Analysis was then carried out on all the research articles in terms of rhetorical functions following the above-mentioned models.

Word Count
The first step taken in the analysis of citation types in different sections of ELT scopus journals was to run a word count to determine the length of the corpus.A total of 1294 citations were identified in 161805 words of Iranian ELT scopus journals and 1805 citations were identified in 195815 words of International ELT scopus journals.
Table 1 and 2 indicate the importance of citations in academic writing, with an average of almost 43.13 in each Iranian ELT journal and 60.16 in each international ELT scopus journal, depicting the characterization that ELT scopus journals tend to employ citations.They also illustrate the average number of citations per 1000 words in both journals.Different sections of journals are filled with different types of citations.Table 3 demonstrates the variation in the ways Iranian researchers refer to sources.As can be seen in Table 3 the information in "introduction" part is cited more frequently than the other parts (42%).
Table 3 shows that there is, then, variation in the density and type of citations used in different rhetorical sections of an article.It is noted that some researchers seldom use citation in abstract section of the article.Percentages of different functions of citations (see Table 4) show that among Iranian ELT scopus journals, the most common rhetorical function of citations is attribution.Attribution can therefore be considered "an unmarked citation function since it is the most common and rhetorically the simplest one" [4] (p. 247).Data in Table 4 also shows, however, that the percentage of attribution citations is considerably higher than other, rhetorically more complex citation types requiring analytical skills are used less often.
Iranian researchers tend to use "establishing link between sources" after the "attribution" function, while they do not have any interest in using the "other" function of citations.A total of 748 citations were identified as integral citation in Iranian ELT scopus journal articles and 546 non-integral citations were also observed (see Table 5 and 6).The sums of these two types of citations are 1294 which equal to the sums of citation counted in [4] framework.Table 5 illustrates that both "verb controlling" and "naming" functions received the same attention by Iranian researchers while "non-citation" ones are somewhat ignored by them.
Within non-integral citations (Table 6), greater emphasis was given to "source" citation by Iranian researchers.In the present study as shown in Table 6., the "identification" type occurs second in rank of the most frequent citations used Iranian ELT scopus journals.And "origin" and "reference" occur respectively.

International Scopus Journals Citations
As can be seen in Table 7, there is considerable variation in the different sections of the articles, with relatively low use of citations in the "abstract" and "result" sections of the articles, and a markedly high use of citations in "introduction", "literature review" and "methodology" section.
Close inspection of the different types of citations according to Petric's [4] framework in the international ELT scopus journal articles reveals interesting differences in the use of citation functions.For example, according to the Table 8, predominantly, the use of "attribution" function is much more frequent and the second priority is given to "establishing link between the sources", and "application" The difference between the "exemplification" and "comparison of one's own finding or interpretation with other sources" is not much.The percentages of "statement of use", "further reference", and "evaluation" are somewhat the same and about under 5 percent.The function of "other" receives a little attention while it was ignored among Iranian researchers.
It can be seen from Table 9 that "naming" function of citation is much more commonly used among integral ones."Verb controlling" with 42.12% is closer to "naming" function than "non-citation" which occurred in the last rank.Table 10.shows that non-integral citation was mostly realized by international writers in the form of "source" function.There is a great difference between the first rank and "identification", as second rank, of this kind which is about 32.8% with 363 frequencies Findings show that "reference" and "origin" are used less often than "source" and "identification" among the non-integral citations  Direct quotations are used more often in international ELT scopus journal articles.The overlaps between the functions according to the Table 11 show that international researchers tend to use more overlaps.As a result, there is a certain overlap of functions: in Iranian articles, 6.95% (90 of 1294) of all citations were used to express more than one function, while in international articles the percentage of such citations is 13.15% (255 of 1805).As Table 12 shows Iranian researchers tend to use citations even in "abstract" section.The frequent function they use is "attribution" while international writers do not use citation in this section.

A Comparison of Iranian and International Citation Types
"Attribution" function tends to give greater prominence to the cited document in the "introduction" sections.Both Iranian and international writers show similarity in this case.The number of citation use in international articles is more than Iranian ones (550 citations as contrasted with 885 citations).The "other" function is used three times in "introduction" section among international articles while it did not occur among Iranian ones (see Table 13).According to Table 14, there is a marked difference between "attribution" function and the other functions.The difference between the use of "attribution" and "establishing links between sources" is somewhat low among the international writers while there is a great difference among Iranian writers in terms of using the mentioned functions.
Table 15 reveals that within the "methodology" section, after "attribution", which is the first in rank in all sections, greater emphasis can be given to "statement of use" and "application" functions.These functions receive the same attention in this section whereas they were ignored in other sections.It implies that in "methodology" section, it is necessary to use these functions.These two functions are mainly used in "methodology" section.
"Comparison of one's work with that of others" is used in international articles much more than Iranian ones (see Table 15).As Table 16 shows, the use of citations are equal in both Iranian and international articles.Iranian researchers tend to acknowledge the contribution of other authors much more than international writers in this section.Table 17 illustrates that "comparison of one's work with that of others" and "establishing links between sources" are the prominent functions in both journal articles and the number of uses among the researchers may catch the attention of readers.The difference between the frequencies of citations among Iranian and international journals are obvious.87 is the difference of the use of citation between the journals.International writers tend to use more citation than the Iranian ones in this section.

Discussion
Both studies of Iranian and international ELT journal articles investigated variation in practice of using citation in two different journals.The lower density of citations amongst Iranian articles (see Table 1) was contrasted with higher occurrence among the international articles (see Table 2) which were stood out.Analysis showed significant differences in the citation practices where international writers tend to use citations more than Iranian researchers.It can be seen, therefore, that the two journals are marked by different degrees of use of citations.One justification for this is that the types of texts produced in these two journals are of different lengths."As articles are shorter texts, there is presumably a need for a more condensed style of writing" [3] (p. 93).
Table 4 and 8 show that in both sets of journals, the most common rhetorical function of citations from Petric's [4] framework is "attribution".As the definition of "attribution" (see Section 1.3.2.) implies, the only job of the writers is attributing the information to authors.So, there is no need for a special creativity on behalf of the writers.Therefore, Petric [4] suggests it does not have any noticeable features and is used widely and is rhetorically the simplest one.
Further differences in citation use in the two groups of journals are revealed when citations are compared for each section of the articles: abstract, introduction, literature review, methodology, result, discussion, and conclusion (see Tables 12,13,14,15,16,17,and 18).The data confirm the Iranian writers' tendency towards greater descriptiveness since they use "attribution" with 58% to a greater extent than the international writers in all sections of articles.The most remarkable differences include the eight times higher of "evaluation" citations in the introduction sections in the international articles (24 citations as compared with 3 ones) and ten times higher in literature review sections (11 citations as compared with 1 citation).The literature review, for example, serves a variety of complex purposes proposed by Ridley (2000) and Swales and Lindemann (2002), including "justification of the focus of the research and the choice of the theoretical framework, operationalization of major concepts and establishment of the grounds for the analysis that follows" (as cited in Petric, [4] ).This complexity of purposes entails the use of a variety of rhetorical functions of citations in these two sections.The findings show that international researchers evaluate the works of others more freely than Iranian ones.Iranian researchers tend to report previous research rather than evaluate it.Taylor and Chen (1991, as cited in [2] ) also reported that the absence of evaluation of previous research can be attributed to the unacceptability of argumentative styles and self-promotion in the cultures considered.The descriptive rather than argumentative nature of Iranian journal writers may stem from the lack of competitive publishing environment and avoidance of self-promotion in the Iranian culture.The frequency of citations in introduction and literature review sections of articles, where a selection of studies is summarized and presented without much elaboration on the links among them or on their relevance to the writer's own research, (see Tables 13 and 14) implies that among Iranian writers the density of citations is slightly high while the great prominence is given to "attribution" function (332 citations in introduction section and 195 citations in literature review sections).But international writers refer to the work of others for a greater variety of rhetorical purposes, most frequently to "establish links among sources" and to evaluate them and use "application" function.Both Iranian and international writers do, however, show a slightly higher proportion of citations used for non-attribution purposes in two articles' sections: in the methodology section, they display a higher figure for the function of "application" (23 citations in Iranian articles and 42 citations in international ones), and for the function of "statement of use" (39 citations in Iranian articles and 63 citations in international ones) and in the discussion sections, they use proportionally more citations for "comparing one's and other authors' work" (43 citations in Iranian articles and 34 citations in international ones).
As shown in Table 5 and 6, writers in Iranian journals use the non-integral "source" citations and integral "naming" and "verb controlling" much more frequently, while international writers make far greater use of integral "naming" citations and non-integral "source" citations.
According to Thompson and Tribble's [3] framework, Charles [12] believes that "the choice of integral and non-integral citation is a complex product of a number of factors including citation convention, genre, discipline and individual study type" (p.317).In this study, however, the preference for integral citation does not seem to be only related to the citation conventions, but to the functions of citations in journals, in which writers prefer to emphasize the author especially in subject position (by using verb controlling citation).They want to show a strong point for their claims in their works by emphasizing the authors rather than information.In academic writing, especially in journals, researchers tend to choose appropriate information supporting their study, without offering any subjective interpretation by means of verbs (e. g. factive and counter-factive verbs).In fact, they do not evaluate the reported text, but they only tend to report it, often using appropriate grammatical patterns, that is, whether to place the author in the subject position in integral citation, or to enclose it parenthetically while they may ignore the rhetorical and discourse level of citation [2].

Conclusion
The main purpose of the present comparative research was to compare articles from Iranian and international ELT scopus journals to find out whether researchers were aware of these frameworks and used them in their journal publication.In this study a comparison between different formats of citation were conducted alongside with the relationship of each section and citation type was divulged respectively.As was mentioned earlier (see Section 1) the area of citation was a neglected one for which most researchers were not aware about the functions of citations.Unlike various researches regarding the use of citation in different sections of articles, most researchers mainly cite authors incorrectly, and as a result, plagiarism takes place.The result of the present research can guide researchers and help with awareness raising regarding the complexity of citation functions for more accurate usage."To understand the importance of citation in the academic setting it would be enough to say that citation, if used properly, would be against literacy piracy" [2] (p.91).The comparison of the rhetorical functions of citations between Iranian and international ELT scopus journal articles revealed that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences in the authors' citation use. the present study revealed differences between Iranian and international ELT journal writers' tendencies to use citations.This result is in line with Petric's [4] findings which showed differences in use of citation between high-rated theses and low-rated theses (see Section 1.3.2.).The present study has shown (see Table 8) that citation use associated with international ELT journal articles is characterized by the use of citation for a greater variety of rhetorical functions.It may be assumed that the more the international writers use citation, the greater proficiency they have in writing abilities such as showing a good knowledge of the literature and demonstrating analytic ability while Petric [4] believed that it does not mean that "effective citation strategies can compensate for the lack of knowledge or analytic ability" (p.251).She continues "effective use of citation may help highlight the knowledge and abilities highly valued by thesis graders and may thus contribute to students' academic success" (p.251).There is another possibility which states that international writers are not afraid of using other authors' works because they are distributing the information.While there may be a fear among Iranian researchers expressing this feeling that the use of citation and works of others might show their incapability and their need for others.it should be mentioned that the writers of both Iranian and international ELT scopus journals use "attribution" more than the other functions based on [4] framework."Establishing link between the sources" received the same attention among both journals' writers.The third most popular function was "application".In other words, the researchers of both journals showed a consistency in the type of citation use based on [4] framework.In addition, Iranian researchers' less use of non-integral citation [3] showed that they usually emphasize the authors in their writing rather than the information, leading the researcher of the present study to conclude that they "focus upon linguistic and grammatical features of theses and ignore functional characteristics" [2] (p.101).On the contrary, the greater tendency of international researchers to use non-integral citation indicated that the center of their attention is on the information.The preference for a special type of citation within ELT scopus journal articles (i.e.integral) is in accordance with the findings of Jalilifar and Dabbi [2] which revealed the familiarity of researchers with formal features of citation, for instance understanding the grammatical points and knowing how to put the author in the subject position and unfamiliarity with the "functional" feature of citation.Based on Merriam Webster's Dictionary, methodology is theoretical analysis of the methods which encompasses paradigm, theoretical model, phases and quantitative or qualitative techniques; hence writers have to use the paradigm, models, formulae, etc. from other authors to support their works.They need to be familiar with the method of citing in this section.The proportions of "comparison of one's work with that of others" function in "discussion" and "conclusion" sections are much more than the other sections (see Tables 17 and 18).It divulged that researchers compare the result of their works with others'.However, it needs to be said that this function is used more frequent among international writers than Iranian ones (3 citations in Iranian journals and 19 citations in international journals).It might be assumed that international researchers are eager to show they are challenging and struggling with the findings of other authors, while Iranian researchers are satisfied with their own findings and refuse to create a challenge for themselves.This research tends to raise the awareness of those who are involved in this area.Appropriate citation use can be considered as one important way to prevent plagiarism, therefor, the results of present study can be suitable for ELT teachers, researchers, and students.
Investigating usual citation patterns used in theses, textbooks or articles will enhance students' understanding of what lies behind the citation choices [4].One way to develop students' citation skills is by raising their awareness of the rhetorical functions that can be achieved through citation.The typology of rhetorical functions outlined in the study conducted by [4] can be used for developing classroom activities, such as exercises where students are given clear examples of different rhetorical functions of citation and asked to match them with the corresponding function, or text analysis tasks where students discuss the writer's intentions behind citation use.As the present study was a comparative one, by analyzing the similarities and differences between the use of citation among Iranian and international writers, different criteria will be recognized.During research paper writing courses teachers can make students aware regarding such criteria and ask them to analyze different texts from different journals to see more differences or similarities."Activities for increasing language proficiency for ELT can focus on phrases for expressing different rhetorical functions of citations, such as evaluative adjectives and adverbs or types of reporting verbs used for different functions in the students' discipline" [4] (p. 251).However, such activities may not be effective if students do not have any knowledge about this issue, and teachers do not have any exposure to this area.The present study can provide the necessary information teachers might need regarding citation and can enable teachers to provide recommendations for their students who can in turn improve their writing skill.If teachers of English Language Teaching are to be able to help learners develop a better control of this essential academic writing knowledge or skill, the present study and different studies in this area such as (Jalilifar & Dabbi, 2010;Petric, 2007;Swales, 1986, Thompson & Tribble, 2001;White, 2004) will be a reliable source for their references.
The following are some of the ideas that seem appropriate for this purpose.These are just a few of the many questions which deserve further investigation as we continue our search for citations functions and their use in academic writing.
1. Other majors or academic levels can be studied.
2. Gender and age were not considered as variables in this study.Other research can be conducted including these variables.
h) Comparison of one's own findings or interpretation with other sources This type of citation plays the role of exhibiting the similarities and difference between the writer's own work and the works of other authors.Pay attention to the following examples: e.g.The results of the interviews conducted in the present study are also in line with the findings of Derahaki's (2008) study … i) Other

Table 1 .
Citations in Iranian ELT Scopus Journals

Table 2 .
Citations in International ELT Scopus Journals

Table 3 .
The Number and Percentage of Citations Types in Iranian ELT Scopus Journal Articles According to Petric's (2007) Framework

Table 4 .
The Number and Percentage of Citations Types in Iranian ELT Scopus Journal Articles According to Petric's (2007) Framework

Table 5 .
The Number and Percentage of Integral Citations in Iranian ELT

Table 6 .
The Number and Percentage of Non-integral Citations in Iranian ELT Scopus Journal Articles According to Thompson and Tribble's

Table 8 .
The Number and Percentage of Citation Types in International ELT Scopus Journal Articles According to Petric's (2007) Framework

Table 9 .
The Number and Percentage of Integral Citations in International ELT Scopus Journal Articles According toThompson and  Tribble's Framework (2001)

Table 10 .
The Number and Percentage of Non-Integral Citations in International ELT Scopus Journal Articles According toThompson and  Tribble's Framework (2001)

Table 11 .
The numbers of Direct Quotations and Overlaps in Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journal Articles

Table 12 .
The Number and Type of Citations Used in Abstract Sections of Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journal Articles

Table 13 .
The Number and Type of Citations Used in Introduction Sections of Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journal Articles

Table 14 .
The Number and Type of Citations Used in Literature review Sections of Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journal Articles

Table 15 .
The Number and Type of Citations Used in Methodology

Table 16 .
The Number and Type of Citations Used in Result Sections of Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journal Articles

Table 17 .
The Number and Type of Citations Used in Discussion Sections of Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journal Articles

Table 18 .
The Number and Type of Citations Used in Conclusion Sections of Iranian and International ELT Scopus Journal Articles