Drawing on the reflexive model of metadiscourse (Adel, 2006), the present study proposes a taxonomy of three types of metadiscourse markers, namely, Personal Metadiscourse (PM), Impersonal Metadiscourse (IM) and Metatext (MT). The proposed taxonomy is derived from a close manual analysis of 238 recent empirical research articles from three different disciplines (Medicine, Economics and Linguistics) from Spanish-medium journals indexed in Web of Science. PM encompasses linguistic expressions in which the participants of the communicative event (writer and/or reader) are explicitly mentioned. IM comprises all references to the participants which are realized obliquely, by relying on an array of depersonalizing strategies. Last, MT groups all those expressions which refer to the text as it unfolds. In MP, three functional categories were identified (self mentions, relational markers and reference to participants), two in IM (impersonal self mentions and impersonal directives), and three categories in MT (references to the code, code glosses, and endophoric markers). One of the more significant findings to emerge from this study is that three MD categories, namely, self mentions realized by means of the verbal system (SMVS), impersonal discourse verb realizations, and impersonal directives (IDIR), are particular to the Spanish language. Pedagogical implications and applications of the taxonomy to corpus-based studies are discussed.