AbstractEmerging from Kaplan's (1966) pioneering work on contrastive rhetoric, rhetorical organization is today practiced with current critical views in language teaching and is regarded as a major pedagogical tool in writing various articles. The present study aimed to investigate the possible relationship between generic organizations of research articles in applied linguistics Iranian journals and negotiation of researchers’ identities. Overall, 30 published research-based articles were selected randomly from four journals. After applying Pho's (2008b) model of move analysis, the obtained results were associated with the instances of writer identity using Hyland's framework (2002). The findings demonstrated different percentages of writer identity categories across different moves of articles. Results suggested that rhetorical moves performing various functions in articles need to be carried out by specific categories of authorial identity to better satisfy the expectations of their respective applied linguistics communities.