‘Nowhere has anyone attempted … In this article I aim to do just that’

This paper is a qualitative corpus-based study of how academic writers can use the personal pronouns I and we to help to create a self-promotional tenor in their prose. Using a corpus comprising journal research articles (RAs) from the fields of Business & Management, Computing Science, Economics, and Physics, I present data extracts which reveal how I and we can publicize the writer and their work even though the pronouns are ostensibly helping to perform other functions, such as creating a research space, organizing the discourse, outlining procedure and/or methodology, explaining the researcher's previous work, reporting or summarizing findings, disputing other researchers’ findings, or indicating potential future directions for research. The study shows that even supposedly ‘author-evacuated’ articles in the hard sciences can be seen to carry a self-promotional flavour with the help of personal pronouns.