This paper aims to investigate Chinese university student researchers’ productive competence of metaphor in EAP writings on the basis of a corpus. The metaphor examined in this paper includes both conceptual metaphor as defined in Cognitive Linguistics and grammatical metaphor proposed in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The findings reveal that what is traditionally termed personification is the only type of conceptual metaphor used by the student researchers, and nominalization is their most frequently used grammatical metaphor. It implies that more efforts are needed to improve student researchers’ competence in using other types of conceptual metaphor and in using verbalization and interpersonal metaphor.