Digital technologies have dramatically changed the way scientists produce, circulate, and disseminate scientific knowledge. Here we investigate women scientists’ writing activity and digitally mediated discursive practices in their professions. Using survey techniques, we identify patterns of professional and public science communication online across the disciplines. We also explore the potentially interrelated genres—“genre systems”—that routinely enact typified rhetorical actions in their professional contexts. The findings show that their socioliterate activity fully reflects the importance that their professional contexts attach to certain “privileged” genres of professional communication (e.g., journal articles), despite the fact that the respondents value highly genres of socially responsible research (e.g., blogs, infographics). Statistical analyses further confirm that “disciplinary culture” is a determining factor in the extent to which respondents engage with collaborative genres and participatory science genres. We report significant differences in the use of digital mediation tools to communicate science online to both expert and lay audiences. Finally, we discuss several implications for writing pedagogy and the development of digital skills to support scientists, especially women, who want or need to promote and disseminate their research widely.

The data article is a digital genre that has emerged in response to new exigencies, namely, to make data more transparent and research processes more trustable and reproducible. Following White’s framework of intersubjective stance, this article draws upon statistical tools and collocational and discourse analyses to examine the linguistic resources deployed by authors to respond to both exigencies. The results show a high presence of dialogically contractive resources (above all, passive constructions and, only in one data article section, inanimate subjects) by which authors do not fully engage with dialogic alternatives (heteroglossic disengagement). Dialogically expansive resources (anticipatory it-subjects and we-pronouns) are extremely rare, corroborating that the authors’ stance is neither monoglossic (undialogized) nor heteroglossically engaged. Further, the discourse functions and ensuing pragmatic effects of the prevailing intersubjective stance resources, significantly different between and among the data article sections, including their associated abstracts, reveal the construal of very distinct dialogic spaces for writer-reader interaction within this article type. Such intra-generic variation may be explained by the social (and rhetorical) action that the genre fulfills, namely, to describe and highlight the value of the research data.