As part of the KIAP project (focusing on the study of Cultural Identities in Academic Prose: www.uib.no/kiap/; Fløttum, Dahl & Kinn 2006), this paper presents an analysis of 160 English and Norwegian research article abstracts within economics and linguistics with a view to characterising the various identities or roles assumed by the author. Three different roles are established, viz. the author as writer, as researcher and as arguer. The findings indicate an economics author who primarily assumes the role of researcher, while the linguist most often assumes the role of arguer. As regards language, there are similarities in author behaviour in English and Norwegian for economics, but differences for linguistics.