Drawing on Hyland's metadiscourse framework, this comparative study explored five types of interactive metadiscourse in a corpus of quantitative and qualitative research articles across the disciplines of applied linguistics, education, and psychology. It disclosed obvious cross-paradigmatic differences in the the rate of reformulators, sequencers, non-linear references and comparative and inferential transitions. It also recognized marked cross-disciplinary differences in the usage of exemplifiers, integral citations, linear references and comparative transitions. These perceived differences are explainable in terms of the opposing epistemologies underpinning the qualitative and quantitative research paradigms and the divergent knowledge-knower structures ruling the studied disciplines.