The academic community needs to have particular skills to acquire academic writing which can lead to academic success. Meta-discourse is a linguistic feature that can help authors enhance the unity of an academic text. It reveals the writer's awareness of the reader and his or her need for elaboration, clarification, guidance, and interaction. Given the importance of meta-discourse in developing a coherent academic paper, the present study aimed at investigating the differences between the use of interactional meta-discourse markers and interactive markers by Iranian authors in their research articles published in ISI and Elmi-Pazhuheshi (EP) journals. Accordingly, the discussion sections of 40 articles (20 articles from ISI journals & 20 articles from EP journals) were extracted and examined for the use of interactive and interactional meta-discourse markers based on Hyland’s (2005) model. The frequency of each marker was counted both automatically using online word frequency counters and manually to increase the accuracy of the findings. Then, the obtained data were analyzed using chi square tests in order to determine whether there are any significant differences in the frequency of interactional and interactive meta-discourse markers as applied in two datasets. Although the findings based on chi square revealed significance associations between meta-discourse markers and journal type. In addition, the analyses of meta-discourse markers frequency showed that interactive markers were more frequent in EP journals while interactional markers were used in ISI journals more than EP journals. Therefore, the requirements of journals can have the major effect on meta-discourse markers' use. The writer's background knowledge, culture, or learning process may be effective in this field as well.
