This article presents a pilot study which has been undertaken as preparation for a comparative research project called "Cultural identity in academic prose". The general aim of the project is to study which aspects of scientific activity are most important for what we may call cultural identity in academic writing. Whether such identities are primarily national or discipline-specific is discussed. The project involves research articles from three disciplines -medicine, economics and linguistics -and three languages -English, French and Norwegian. The central questions are related to authorial presence and stance, to the manifestation of other researchers' voices and to the authors' promotion of their own research. This article takes a linguistic approach, and the pilot study focuses on the use of the following categories: first person pronouns, metatextual comments, explicit and implicit references and lexical items. The pilot study comprises 18 research articles; in the large-scale study the corpus will consist of about 500 articles. In the pilot study presented here the main finding is that the proposed categories seem to be well suited to the purposes of the large-scale study. The data also allow some preliminary hypotheses about 'non-expressive medical researchers', 'shy economists' and 'polemic linguists' to be formulated.