Mapping the UN Second World Ocean Assessment: Challenges and Opportunities

Our project aims to use the reports from the United Nations Second World Ocean Assessment (WOA II) to build a global corpus of ocean research literature using citation and search-based information retrieval approaches. In this first step towards this larger goal, we extracted references from the WOA II, collected their identifiers with Crossref and OpenAlex, and used VosViewer and Gephi to create and visualize citation-based networks of the literature mobilized in the reports. Our preliminary analysis shows that 76% of references had DOIs, with a significant portion lacking adequate metadata, highlighting the need for metadata enrichment, especially for chapters with references lacking this information. Despite these challenges, the maps show promise for reflecting the structure of the WOA II, identifying clusters, and developing search strategies to retrieve a more comprehensive set of literature on these topics.