Given the high number of non-native English speakers in academia, it becomes necessary to look at the use made of English as a lingua franca (ELF), especially in written communication. It is the aim of this paper to look at ELF in a written academic genre, the research article (RA), in the discipline of business management. A corpus of ELF RAs written by scholars with different linguacultural backgrounds will be compared with a corpus of RAs written by scholars affiliated to Anglo-American institutions. The analysis will focus on a particular genre- specific formulaic sequence (Hu¨ttner, 2007), evaluative it-clauses. Results show differences in their frequency of use, the choice of adjectives, and (lack of) modality. The findings can be interpreted as lexico-grammatical innovations (Dewey, 2007), creative expressions (Seidlhofer, 2011), or emerging patterns (Jenkins, Cogo, & Dewey, 2011) in the process of adaptation, evolution and dynamism of English as used in international written academic communication
