The article reports a corpus-based contrastive study of hedges used in English research articles by mainland Chinese and native English scholars that appeared in the journal Nanotechnology． The results show that the mainland Chinese scholars’ articles have a slightly higher percentage of hedges as a whole and only the Conclusion Section in their writing contains a lower frequency of hedging expressions than their counterparts’when four sections of the articles by the two categories of scholars are examined separately，but there is no statistically significant difference in the Introduction Sections． With the exception of attribution， no statistically significant difference is found between the two groups in the frequency of three of the four sub-categories of hedges，namely adaptor，rounder and plausibility． Parts of speech of the hedges are examined and lexical and auxiliary verbs are identified as the most frequently used in the two corpora and nouns as the least． It is also found that a large number of most frequently used hedges in the articles by both Chinese and native scholars overlap but many of them differ remarkably in frequency and how they are used and some are even used by the mainland Chinese scholars incorrectly or in wrong registers．