In research publications, the judicious interweaving of others' voices plays a crucial role in positioning the author's claim, and has therefore received considerable attention (Swales 2004; Hyland 1999, inter alia). As various discourse analysis studies have pointed out, however (e.g. Fløttum et al. 2006), both disciplinary and cultural factors may impinge on citation practices. This cross-cultural study investigates the different citation practices in French and English academic publication, in order to identify the potential problem areas for French researchers when publishing in English. Using in-text references and their associated linguistic conventions appropriately can be particularly difficult for novice and non-native speaker researchers alike, and non-native speakers may also lack the necessary linguistic skills to position their research claims in an acceptable and/or effective manner. To address this topic, two corpora have been collected: a corpus of pre-publication draft manuscripts written in English by French academics, in engineering, science, and computational linguistics, drawn from the two authors' long-standing experience of editing research manuscripts; and a smaller reference corpus of research articles published in French in the same disciplines. After a brief review of certain formal differences between citation practices in French and English, which may impact on French researchers' citing behaviour, the study will focus on three main problem areas detected during analysis of the data: inappropriate referencing per se, lexical choices, and textual cohesion. The study will attempt to identify the origin of the anomalies noted (cultural, linguistic or other) and to assess the impact of these problems on the clarity and rhetorical effectiveness of the argument. By comparing the results with those of studies on the citation practices of novice writers (Thompson & Tribble 2001; Pecorari 2006; Petrić 2007), we hope to pinpoint some of the more specific intercultural facets of citation practices in international research publication, and to contribute to the current debate on the problem of patchwriting.