Whether a researcher may write “I analyzed the data” instead of “the data were analyzed” is one of the most persistent style questions in academic writing, and the honest answer is that it depends on which convention governs the document: a long-standing tradition discouraged first person as immodest or insufficiently objective, while the major current style manuals, led by APA, now explicitly endorse it for the opposite reason—clarity about who did what.
The traditional convention, and why it took hold
The convention against first person in scientific and scholarly writing developed alongside the broader 20th-century push toward an “objective,” passive-voice register in scientific prose—the idea being that a paper should read as a report on what was found, not a narrative about what a particular person did, and that removing the researcher’s “I” from the sentence somehow removed the researcher’s subjectivity from the finding. In practice this produced constructions like “the samples were collected” or “it was hypothesized that,” and a related habit of referring to oneself in the third person (“the author,” “the present researcher”) to avoid “I” without switching all the way to passive voice.
That convention is still real—plenty of instructors, journals, and individual disciplines continue to enforce some version of it—but it was never actually a universal rule imposed by the major style guides themselves. It is closer to a norm that outlived the reasoning behind it in some fields while being formally reversed in others.
What APA 7 actually says
The single most consequential fact for anyone deciding whether to write “I” is this: APA Style has no rule against first-person pronouns and explicitly encourages their use, a position APA Style’s own editorial team has had to restate directly because the opposite belief is common enough to be, in their words, a persistent myth. Per APA’s guidance (Publication Manual, 7th edition, Section 4.16; Concise Guide, Section 2.16):
- Use “I” when you are the sole author, and “we” when referring to yourself and your coauthors together.
- Do not substitute a third-person self-reference (“the author,” “the researcher,” “the present investigator”) for “I” or “we” — APA specifically warns this creates ambiguity for the reader about whether the writer or someone else performed the action, which is the opposite of the clarity the convention was originally meant to protect.
- Reserve “we” for your actual coauthors. Using an editorial “we” to mean “people in general” or “researchers generally” is discouraged as vague.
- First person is appropriate both for describing what you did methodologically (“I recruited 42 participants”) and for signaling your own interpretive stance (“I argue that…”).
APA does add one caveat worth taking seriously: first-person pronouns should still be used with restraint. A paragraph that opens nearly every sentence with “I” reads as repetitive regardless of whether each individual instance is technically correct, and APA’s own repetition guidance applies here as much as anywhere else in the manuscript.
When first person is genuinely the better choice
Independent of what any single style manual mandates, first person is usually the clearer option in a specific set of recurring situations:
- Describing your own methodological decisions. “I excluded three outliers because…” states, unambiguously, whose decision it was and why. The passive equivalent, “three outliers were excluded,” can leave a careful reader unsure whether that was the author’s judgment call, a pre-registered protocol rule, or something a collaborator did.
- Distinguishing your contribution from prior work. “Whereas Smith (2019) modeled X, I extend this to Y” is direct. Passive constructions tend to blur exactly this kind of attribution, which matters more, not less, in a discipline that cares about establishing novel contribution.
- Stating an interpretive or argumentative position. In fields where the paper is explicitly building an argument rather than only reporting a procedure — much of the humanities, qualitative social science, and any discussion/conclusion section that makes a claim about what the results mean — “I argue,” “I contend,” or “my analysis suggests” is standard and expected, not a lapse in formality.
- Reflexivity in qualitative and interview-based research. Where the researcher’s own position, choices, or relationship to participants is methodologically relevant (common in ethnography, some social-work and education research, and qualitative methods more broadly), first person is often the only accurate way to write it.
When it’s still worth avoiding or limiting
Endorsement from APA and similar guidance elsewhere does not mean first person is universally the right call in every sentence. It is still worth limiting or avoiding in a few situations:
- A specific journal or supervisor’s style overrides general guidance. Individual journals, and many graduate programs, set their own house style; if a target journal’s author guidelines or a thesis committee explicitly restrict first person, that instruction controls regardless of what APA or any other manual generally permits. Check the actual submission guidelines rather than assuming a general style manual’s position transfers automatically.
- Standardized procedural language in Methods sections. Even in fields and journals that are otherwise comfortable with first person, procedure-first passive phrasing (“samples were centrifuged at 10,000g for 10 minutes”) remains common in Methods sections specifically, because the point of that sentence is the procedure, not who performed it — a convention that persists even at journals whose broader style now favors active voice as the default elsewhere in the paper.
- Overuse. As above, stacking “I” at the start of many consecutive sentences reads as repetitive and can make a paper sound more like a personal narrative than a structured argument, even when each individual sentence is grammatically and stylistically fine.
- Editorial “we.” Using “we” to mean “people generally” or “readers” (“we know that climate change is accelerating”) rather than “my coauthors and I” is a distinct, discouraged usage — it is vague about who “we” refers to in a way that undermines the same clarity goal first person is otherwise meant to serve.
Discipline and style-guide variation
There is no single answer that holds across every field, because the underlying conventions genuinely differ:
- Biomedical and hard sciences. This is where the traditional passive/impersonal convention has the deepest roots and the most staying power, particularly in Methods sections, even as many biomedical journals now recommend active voice more broadly for readability. First person for stating a contribution or interpretation (“I hypothesize that…”) is increasingly accepted in Discussion sections even in these fields, but check the specific journal.
- Psychology and social sciences. APA Style, the dominant manual in psychology and widely used across the social sciences, explicitly encourages first person, as detailed above — this is the field where the shift has been most formally codified.
- Humanities. First-person argumentation (“I argue,” “in this essay I show”) is long-established and largely uncontroversial in literary studies, philosophy, and history, where the paper is understood as the author’s own interpretive argument rather than a report of a replicable procedure.
- Engineering and some physical sciences. Passive and third-person conventions remain comparatively more entrenched here than in psychology or the humanities, though this varies significantly by specific journal and sub-field, and there is no single style manual with the influence APA has in psychology to point to as a universal reference.
Because the honest answer is “it depends on the journal, the discipline, and sometimes the individual section of the paper,” the reliable move is the same one APA itself effectively recommends: default to first person where it is clearer, then check the specific target journal’s author guidelines or a supervisor’s stated requirements before finalizing the manuscript, rather than assuming either “always use I” or “never use I” holds everywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use “I” in a research paper?
In most current style guides, yes. APA Style explicitly permits and encourages it, and it is standard in the humanities and much of qualitative social science. Whether a specific paper should depends on the target journal’s or institution’s own style requirements, which take precedence over general guidance when they conflict.
Does APA style allow first person?
Yes. APA Style (Publication Manual, 7th edition, Section 4.16) has no prohibition on first-person pronouns and specifically states that using them helps avoid ambiguity about who performed an action, compared with third-person self-references like “the author” or “the researcher.”
Is it acceptable to write “we” in a single-author paper?
No — under APA guidance, “we” is reserved for referring to yourself and actual coauthors together. A solo author should use “I.” Using “we” to mean “people generally” (the editorial “we”) is separately discouraged as vague, regardless of authorship.
Why do some journals or professors still discourage first person?
Individual journals and instructors can and do set their own house style, and the older objective/passive-voice convention still holds in parts of some disciplines — particularly Methods sections in biomedical and physical-science writing. That local requirement overrides general style-guide permission when the two conflict, so it is worth checking the specific target’s author guidelines directly.
Is first person the same issue as active versus passive voice?
Related but distinct. First person is about which pronoun refers to the author (“I,” “we,” versus third-person substitutes); active versus passive voice is about sentence structure (who or what is the grammatical subject). The two often move together in practice — first person almost always produces active-voice sentences — but a sentence can be written in active voice without using first person at all (e.g., “the results demonstrate,” “this study examines”). See Active Voice vs. Passive Voice for the voice-specific distinction.
Related CASRAI resources
- Active Voice vs. Passive Voice — the related sentence-structure convention, including what APA and major science journals actually recommend.
- Manuscript Writing: A Practical Guide to Structuring a Research Paper for Journal Submission — where first-person and voice choices fit into the larger drafting process.
- How to Write a Research Paper in APA Style — general APA formatting guidance for structuring a paper.
- Scholarly Writing hub — manuscript structure, style conventions, and journal submission mechanics for researchers.
