Abstract

The referee report is an interactive and private genre which takes part of a chain of genres that ends up in the publication of a research article. Authors, evaluators and editors participate in this process. Given its private character, referee reports are scarcely studied. Studies on politeness have developed a set of proposals to explain face-to-face interaction. As the emphasis is generally placed on linguistics aspects, discourse analysis does not include criteria to determine the status of referees with respect to the speech community they belong to. In our work, we analyze hedging politeness strategies present in 44 referee reports produced by evaluators with different status (academic degrees and citation counts) and corresponding to the peer review process of Onomazein, a Chilean journal edited by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. After a manual analysis, the results showed that referees with either PhD or BSc degree used less hedging strategies while referees having a MSc degree used more hedging politeness strategies. These data help understanding the social dynamics underlying the production of scientific knowledge.