This study aimed at investigating the tendency of research article (RA) authors for the application of nominalization in RA discussion sections from the perspective of two discourse communities. To this end, 150 RA discussion sections were selected from local and international Applied Linguistics journals. Following the rhetorical structure analysis of the corpus and the move tagging, the authors analyzed the vertical and horizontal distribution of the nominalization types within and between the journals. The results demonstrated that international RA authors show a greater preference to use nominalization in certain moves of the discussion sections, and this can be explained by considering the move function and nominalization types. It was also revealed that a large number of nominalizations are located in some moves than others. In other words, authors use nominalization in these moves to ameliorate the style and the language of the discussion sections to sound more persuasive. Finally, fine-grained qualitative analyses are presented.