Arguably, novice writers were warned of using “I”,“we”, or equivalents in an academic essay of hard sciences to“pretend to a scientific scholarly style”(Spack, 1988, p.39), although the issue of impersonality and its interdisciplinary variations have been documented in the research literature (Hyland, 2002). Now, it was partially acknowledged that authors were omniscient, as captured by Ivanic? & Camps (2001): “There is no such thing as ‘impersonal' writing…”. (p.5) However, as self-mention was obviously subjective, it followed that natural science RAs should be more objective to include few “I”s or “we”s. To attest to this belief, this paper investigated whether there were self-mentions in 4 published works (of renown journals) written by Chinese scholars from the Chemistry Department.