This study investigated the citation competence of Chinese English-major student writers in comparison with professional writers, and further explored how citation features differ between the Introduction and the Literature Review. Following Xu’s (2016) framework grounded in the metafunctions of systemic functional linguistics—as operationalised by Li and Zhang (2021)—every citation was analysed for four features placed under three dimensions: content (ideational), function and writer’s stance (interpersonal), and type (textual). A corpus of 3520 citations from 30 theses by Chinese student writers (802,026 words) and 1204 citations from 15 professional journal articles (122,968 words) was annotated, combining automatic software-based extraction and coding with manual verification. Results show that the professional writers cited significantly more densely (9.79 vs. 4.39 per 1000 words) and fulfilled the application and topic-relevance functions, and the source and reference types, significantly more than the student writers, with large effect sizes (Cohen’s d > 1) for all these features. An analysis of reporting verbs showed that the professionals favoured factive verbs (find, identify, show) that endorse cited claims, whereas the students relied on non-factive attribution verbs (propose, point out, believe), the lexical basis of their covert, neutral stance. The student writers, for their part, relied predominantly on the supporting function and on a person-oriented, integral citation style. Further analysis indicates that the rhetorical function of each section shapes the distribution of citation features: in the student writers’ texts, integral (naming) citations and citations of concepts and theories concentrate in the Literature Review, whereas the Introduction is dominated by non-integral source citations of research topics. The study offers implications for theorising L2 citation competence and for teaching academic writing to Chinese learners.
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