A reception study of the articles published in English for Specific Purposes from 1990–1999

► Argues reception studies have been neglected in ESP. ► Takes an example from the ESP literature itself. ► Identifies the most highly cited papers. ► Attempts to explain why. ► Is the first study to do this in this field. EAP practitioners in advanced courses have often focused on assisting junior scholars who are non-native speakers of English with their attempts to publish in English. Today, however, university administrators increasingly rely on post-publication data such as citation records. We therefore suggest that identifying heavily cited and largely uncited papers would be an addition to the advanced writing instructor’s toolkit. In fact, many proposals have been made to account for citational success and failure. Disentangling these variables is complex and typically requires in-depth knowledge of the chosen sub-field. Here we examine the reception histories of a decade’s worth of main articles in the English for Specific Purposes Journal, using the Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science databases. Analysis of the 15 most cited articles indicates that placement in an issue, gender, first language, author status, and provenance are not major determinants. Instead, area of research interest (i.e., discoursal features of academic text) and type of ESP (i.e., EAP) were the main predisposing factors. We then conduct a close analysis of the two top 1990s papers (both, incidentally, written by women whose first language is not English and working in non-Anglophone settings). We conclude with some implications of these findings for EAP practitioners and their “customers”.