Chapter 5 Discourse reflexivity in dialogic writing I think that conferences have become a rather sterile ground lately: people are afraid to speak up, lively discussions never arise because the agendas are too tight, and moderators cut out anything that seems controversial.Fortunately, there is the web:)This quote from a science blog comment thread reflects some of the tensions that perhaps inevitably whirl around established high-stakes genres: some people feel standard formats are holding things back, and that there is a real need for new forms and new arenas for research to flourish freely.Hopes have also been pinned on the potential of digital science communication to democratize science.As digital media affords a whole new universe of discourses with a potentially global reach and an interactive disposition, it has also added a terra incognita to the quest for uses of discourse reflexivity: the usual gatekeeping practices of academia break down in this huge public arena where anyone can participate in discussions around scientific matters.How do these web-based communities work, where do they adopt linguistic norms and practices from, what practices do they develop independentlyand for the present study specificallyhow do they use discourse reflexivity?Research into digital genres has begun to take metadiscourse on board only relatively recently (e.g.Smart 2016; Bondi 2018; Mauranen 2013a; Zou & Hyland 2020; Papers in D'Angelo, Mauranen & Maci 2021), but the interest is rapidly expanding.The digital age has meant a massive expansion in dialogic, multi-party writing, and digital communication in its various forms has attracted enormous research interest.Blog communication, for example, has been approached through its technical properties (e.g., Herring 2007), or investigated by content analysis (e.g., Gunawardena, Lowe & Anderson 1997; Ng, Cheung & Hew 2012), and a variety of other perspectives on specifically academic blogs have also been put forward, for example in Myers (2010), papers in Kuteeva & Mauranen (2018) and Luzón in several studies (e.g.Luzón 2011Luzón, 2012Luzón, 2013aLuzón,b, 2018)).This chapter continues to investigate dialogue in metadiscourse by changing the medium (speech to writing) but keeping the mode (dialogue) intact.It explores discourse reflexivity in dialogic writing in discussion threads on research blog sites.There is little previous research into discourse reflexivity in web-based written dialogue that I am aware of (but see Smart 2016; Biri 2021.Smart's (2016) study in online message board discourse was pioneering.His approach to discourse reflexivity is very similar to the current one, which makes his results sufficiently compatible with mine to warrant comparisons despite his somewhat