A Bibliometric Survey of Metadiscourse (1979-2023): Looking behind to Look Ahead

Abstract

This paper aims to present the academic output of metadiscourse studies in terms of publication trends, journals, authors, and institutions; reveal the structure of scientific collaboration networks with regard to co-authorship, institutional and country cooperation; point out the robust research areas and promising research trends concerning metadiscourse. To meet this objective, the bibliometric records of metadiscourse-related publications are first retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. Then, the bibliometric analysis and social network analysis are employed to analyze the retrieved bibliometric databased with bibliometrix and VOSviewer. Our bibliometric analysis shows that the overall trend of metadiscourse-related publications has been on the increase, with a relatively slow growth before 2005 and two periods of rapid growth after 2005 and 2015. The most productive journal, author, institution and country are Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Ken Hyland, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and China. On the other hand, the social network analysis yields collaboration networks, and keyword-based co-occurrence networks. The collaboration networks show that author and institution collaboration networks are sparser than the country collaboration network. It also reveals that non-English speaking countries such as China and Spain have recently surpassed English-speaking countries and become main research hubs of metadiscourse research. The keyword-based co-occurrence network reveals metadiscourse research are mainly focused on academic discourse, with a focus on how interactional devices like stance and hedges are used in different genres through corpus and discourse analysis, primarily based on Hyland’s interpersonal model. The year-overlayed co-word network sketches the evolution of genres from written discourse through spoken discourse to multimodal discourse, research approaches from genre analysis and discourse analysis to corpus analysis, research models from textual-interpersonal to interactive-interactional, and theoretical frameworks from contrastive rhetoric through pragmatics to systemic functional linguistics. Hence, the findings are expected to help orient novice researchers to metadiscourse studies, and offer the insights for future researcher to address the emerging issues of metadiscourse.