Self-promotional strategies in doctoral thesis conclusions: A cross-disciplinary corpus-based analysis

Doctoral theses are important genres of academic writing that mark the transition of postgraduate students to become experts in their respective fields. However, little is known about how doctoral students construct their scholarly identity and self-promote their research in the conclusion chapter—a macro-genre that offers a final opportunity to reinforce the thesis’s importance. To address this gap, this study examines self-mention as a promotional strategy in doctoral thesis conclusions across three disciplines: Applied Linguistics, Psychology, and Physics. Using a two-stage sampling method, 150 doctoral theses were selected from the eight UGC-funded Hong Kong Universities (2015–2024). The study utilised LancsBox X (5.0.3) to search for the frequencies of grammatical forms of self-mention, UAM Corpus Tool (6.0) to annotate and calculate the frequencies of their rhetorical roles, and JASP (0.19.3) to conduct one-way between subject ANOVA analyses on the frequencies of the grammatical forms and rhetorical roles. Analyses revealed significant disciplinary differences in the grammatical forms and rhetorical roles of self-mention. Grammatically, grammatical subjects in the nominative case differed across disciplines. Rhetorically, significant disciplinary differences were found in in the use of researcher roles. Based on these findings, implications are derived for English- for-academic-purposes pedagogy, doctoral supervision, and further research on promotion.