Research almost always builds upon existing, peerreviewed literature. This is how we understand the development of ideas in our disciplines, formulate meaningful new questions, and advance our knowledge. But several of the authors of this article have noted disturbingly inaccurate reporting of our study findings when cited by others. We have also noted copying and pasting of phrases and citations from published articles in a way that distorts or even completely changes the meaning of the source. For us, this calls into question the quality and meaning of scientific advancement. It is tempting to believe that citation practices are worse in lower-impact journals, and that we can more easily rely on the quality of the logic and ideas presented in more prestigious journals. But we have noticed inaccurate citations in some high-impact journals as well. These observations led us to attempt to quantify the extent of inaccurate citation in the recently published ecological literature, to compare citation accuracy with journal impact factor (IF) and also compare our results to a previous study of citation accuracy in journals with IF[ 1 (Todd et al., 2007). Publication is one of the primary measures of success in the competitive field of academics. This, perhaps unavoidably, encourages the stretching of research to maximise the quantity of publications produced (Lawrence, 2003), can discourage transparency when it comes to sharing of information on methods (Anderson et al., 2007) and can seem to reward minor misconduct such as poor citation practices. The resulting unintentional or negligent spread of misinformation undermines scientific advancement and individual’s professional credibility over the long term. Financial incentives for publishing houses may also contribute to the problem of poor citation practices. Scientific writing (to our surprise, at least), is not only our primary means of communication with the wider scientific community, but is also a product with a market value (Bergstrom and Bergstrom, 2006). Growing financial incentives (e.g. library subscription fees) are at least partially responsible for the recent proliferation of new journals in ecology, and more broadly in science. Since 1980, the number of ecology-related journals listed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has doubled (currently 129), with for-profit or joint for-profit/nonprofit publishers accounting for most of this increase. A concern over the perceived growth of unethical practices in science is implicit in many opinion pieces Handling editor: Sidinei Magela Thomaz