Evaluation of the Current State of Mechanistic Aquatic Biogeochemical Modeling: Citation Analysis and Future Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined the factors that determine the citations of 153 mechanistic aquatic biogeochemical modeling papers published from 1990 to 2002. Our analysis provides overwhelming evidence that ocean modeling is a dynamic area of the current modeling practice. Models developed to gain insight into the ocean carbon cycle/marine biogeochemistry are most highly cited, the produced knowledge is exported to other cognitive disciplines, and oceanic modelers are less reluctant to embrace technical advances (e.g., assimilation schemes) and more critically increase model complexity. Contrary to our predictions, model application for environmental management issues on a local scale seems to have languished; the pertinent papers comprise a smaller portion of the published modeling literature and receive lower citations. Given the critical planning information that these models aim to provide, we hypothesize that the latter finding probably stems from conceptual weaknesses, methodological omissions, and an evident lack of haste from modelers to adopt new ideas in their repertoire when addressing environmental management issues. We also highlight the lack of significant association between citation frequency and model complexity, model performance, implementation of conventional methodological steps during model development (e.g., validation, sensitivity analysis), number of authors, and country of affiliation. While these results cast doubt on the rationale of the current modeling practice, the fact that the Fasham et al. (1990) paper has received over 400 citations probably dictates what should be done from the modeling community to meet the practical need for attractive and powerful modeling tools.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.035 | 0.147 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.066 | 0.117 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".