The language and rhetoric of bibliographic citation in the field of computing: A report of preliminary results

This paper describes a preliminary investigation of bibliographic citation practices in the field of computing, based on linguistic and rhetorical analyses of 1,255 citations in 36 academic papers from four representative journals in the field: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and the IEEE Transactions on Computers. Rhetorical functions of the citations are identified, along with representative examples of the language that is used to achieve the rhetorical goals. The data is then discussed in light of current bibliographic citation instruction, and recommendations are made for developing better training for novices and nonnative speakers of English who need more specific than is normally available.