【Abstract】Research articles have long been employed as the most common method of disseminating research findings. With the progress of internationalization， an increasingly number of Chinese postgraduates and doctoral students now tend to write English research articles to present their research achievements to the international academic community. This paper investigated the use of first person pronouns in research articles written by native English scholars and compared the similarities and differences in the use of first person pronouns between natural science and social science academic writing. Through corpus-based analysis， the author hopes to find out some features and functions of the use of first person pronouns in English research articles， and to offer Chinese novice researchers some valuable reference to their English academic writing.
　　【Key words】first person pronouns； academic writing； collocation； discourse functions
　　1. Introduction
　　Research articles have long been characterized by the use of nominalizations and passive sentences. However， recent studies （Clark， 1992； Ivanic， 1998； Ivanic