Interdisciplinarity and academic writing: a corpus-based case study of three interdisciplines

This corpus-based study is aimed at exploring interdisciplinarity in academic writing in the light of two different linguistic aspects: citation practices and adjectives of importance. More specifically, these features have been compared across a corpus of Research Articles from the interdisciplines of Educational Neuroscience, Economic History, and Science & Technology Studies. In addition, comparisons between the interdisciplinary fields and their related single-domain disciplines have been carried out. The methodology applied for the study of the linguistic features combines the analysis of the quantitative data with their qualitative interpretation by means of close reading. It has been concluded that both citations and adjectives of importance are viable tools to explore typical features of interdisciplinary writing in the fields explored. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the findings reported are useful to the description of different types of relationships between disciplines when interacting in the matrix of interdisciplinary fields