Working ever faster – or the curious case of Horton (1940)

Working ever faster – or the curious case of Horton (1940) | Authorea try { document.documentElement.classList.add('js'); } catch (e) { } var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'G-8VDV14Y67G']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Skip to main content Preprints Collections Wiley Open Research IET Open Research Ecological Society of Japan All Collections About About Authorea FAQs Contact Us Quick Search anywhere Search for preprint articles, keywords, etc. Search Search ADVANCED SEARCH SCROLL Hydrological Processes This is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed. Data may be preliminary. 20 February 2025 V1 Latest version Share on Working ever faster – or the curious case of Horton (1940) Author : Keith Beven 0000-0001-7465-3934 [email protected] Authors Info & Affiliations https://doi.org/10.22541/au.174008714.40428512/v1 Published Hydrological Processes Version of record Peer review timeline 305 views 359 downloads Contents Abstract Information & Authors Metrics & Citations View Options References Figures Tables Media Share Abstract Novel Aspects: commentary about checking citations based on discovery that Horton (1940) cited 25 times according to Google Scholar has no content. Hydrological Processes Invited Commentary Working ever faster – or the curious case of Horton (1940) Keith Beven Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, UK [email protected] Novel Aspects: commentary about checking citations based on discovery that Horton (1940) cited 25 times according to Google Scholar has no content. Keywords: spurious citations, Robert Horton, LeRoy Sherman, infiltration theory, surface runoff When I was a PhD student in the 1970s, and in fact for a long time after as a researcher and academic, to keep up to date with new literature it was necessary to go to a library holding the journals of interest (in my case the primary journals included Water Resources Research, Journal of Hydrology, Hydrological Sciences Bulletin (as it was then) , Water Resources Bulletin, ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Journal of Soil Science, Soil Science Society of America Proceedings, Journal of Agricultural Meteorology, and Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society …. Hydrological Processes of course did not exist until much later in 1987). In the library there would be special shelves for new issues of journals, often with the copies for the current year stored behind. Sometimes it was necessary to go to the shelves to check on issues before they went for binding into annual (or more frequent) volumes. There were some abstract systems (in hydrology and geomorphology Keith Clayton at the University of East Anglia had founded Geoabstracts in 1969) but these were still hard copy and necessarily came out sometime after the journals themselves. So it was more effective, if somewhat time-consuming, to spend time in the library checking on new papers in the journals of interest as they became available. This had two important advantages. One was that of serendipity. In going through the contents pages of journals in hard copy it was often the case that you would find interesting papers outside of your main interests. Sometimes this could lead to following up an interesting topic that might later lead to some useful outcome. The equivalent today is browsing through the emails of journal alerts, but the number of emails is ever increasing, and the lists of paper titles and abstracts are ever longer, and there is naturally a tendency to filter out anything that does not appear immediately relevant rather than clicking though to an abstract or paper. The second advantage was that, reading a paper in hard copy, you could be sure that it existed. That is not always the case for papers found by internet search engines such as Google Scholar or reports from artificial intelligence (AI) agents. This brings us to the curious case of the paper of Robert Elmer Horton (1975-1945) in the Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (TAGU) in 1940. The Transactions at that time served to publish the reports of the various Committees and Subcommittees of the different Sections of AGU, as well as the written version of papers presented at meetings of AGU each year. The AGU Section of Hydrology, which had been founded only 7 years earlier in 1931, had multiple Committees in 1940. Reports were presented for the Committees on Runoff (by W.G. Hoyt), Snow (by J.E. Church), Glaciers (by François E. Matthes), Evaporation and Transpiration (by Joseph Kittredge), Infiltration (by G.W. Musgrave), Physics of Soil Moisture (by N.E. Edlefsen), Underground Waters (by David G. Thompson), Physical Limnology (by T.C. Adams) and Dynamics of Streams (by Lorenz G. Straub). There were also reports from the Special Committee on Flood Waves (also by Lorenz G. Straub), the Coordinating Committee between the American Society of Agricultural Engineers and AGU (by H.S. Riesbol) and the Advisory Committee of the Soil Conservation Service, written by Robert Horton for which he served as Chair (reports were presented during the years 1938-1940). Among the published papers presented at the AGU Meeting in Washington D.C. in April 1940 were those by some well-known hydrologists such as Franklin F. Snyder (“Predicting headwater river stages directly from rainfall”), C. W. Thornthwaite (“A year of evaporation from a natural surface”), LeRoy K. Sherman (“Derivation of infiltration-capacity (f) from average loss-rates (fav)”), H. N. Holtan (“A graphical method of analysis of sprinkled-plat hydrographs” with A. L. Sharp), C. E. Jacob (“On the flow of water in an elastic artesian aquifer”), Don Kirkham (“Artificial Drainage of Land”), Harold A. Thomas (“Graphical integration of the flood wave equations”), and two by Walter B. Langbein (“Determination of Manning’s n from vertical velocity curves” and “Channel-Storage and Unit-hydrograph studies”). There was also a paper by Thorndike Saville on “Report on deficiencies in hydrologic research”) that summarised a report prepared by the Advisory Committee on Hydrologic Data for the Water Resources Committee of the National Planning Board. Thorndike Saville notes: “To my mind one of the most important recommendations of the report relates to the necessity for some type of clearing house for hydrologic research undertakings. It seems a great pity that Federal and State agencies and others engaged in hydrologic research so frequently go ahead on extremely interesting and valuable studies, without any knowledge of what another agency or individual is doing, without knowledge of the methodology which may have been developed elsewhere, without information as to the availability of data which is to be found buried in the files of some agency or individual, all of which represents a vast waste of time and effort” (TAGU, v.20(2), 1940, p.505). Some things do not change much with time, it seems. Robert Horton also has two papers listed that year, one with Edward L. Beutner and Ralph R. Gaebe on “Sprinkled-Plat Runoff- and Infiltration-Experiments on Arizona Desert Soils” (pages 550-558), and one as sole author with the title “The infiltration-theory of surface runoff” (p541). The reason why only one page is listed for the latter is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. The complete manuscript of Horton (1940) as copied from Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, volume 22, page 541. There are, of course, many other papers by Horton relating to infiltration (see, for example, Beven, 2004, 2021). There is even a paper by LeRoy K. Sherman some years earlier with the same title, as an Appendix to the Report from the Committee on Rainfall and Runoff 1934-35 (Sherman, 1935) which aimed to summarise Horton’s concepts. The reason why Horton’s 1940 paper might be considered curious is, however, that Google Scholar suggests that it has been cited 25 times (that is more than over 100 of my own papers on Web of Science that I know to contain content, even if they are clearly of limited interest to others). Several of these citations are marked by Google Scholar as [citation] including 4 with dates before 1940 (not sure what the Google Scholar algorithm is doing there), and one in 1942 in the volume by H.W. Wood on Flood flow on Missouri Streams, published by the University of Missouri (Wood, 1942). This is available online and does indeed cite Horton 1940. However, much more curiously, the remaining 21 citations are all after 2016, when it is cited in a paper in the Italian Journal of Groundwater . In 2017 there is a citation in the Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment , but then things start to get more mainstream with citations in Vadose Zone Journal , Environmental Pollution , Journal of Hydrologic Engineering , and Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering . It even appears in a Handbook of Water Resources Engineering and a Handbook of Atmospheric Measurements . There are already citations listed in 2024 and 2025. Clearly the title suggests that this paper gives a good summary of Horton’s infiltration theory, but the authors have not actually checked (and, of course, such a citation would also seem to be entirely plausible to referees). So the moral of this story is that you should not trust Google Scholar or AI agents to provide useful material based on titles alone. It is certainly an efficient way of filtering the ever-increasing volume of hydrological literature when the pressure is to produce outcomes ever faster. Just be aware that sometimes this might be a matter of working too fast if it means using search results without actually checking if a reference produces what the title and citation suggest. This is not totally new of course. There was always the possibility in the pre-internet era of taking titles from reference lists in published papers and citing those papers without checking. But the danger is clearly greater today when journal contents lists and Google Scholar searches can be delivered directly to the screens on our desks or even to our mobiles. There are already documented cases of AI agents “hallucinating” spurious references to support answers to queries (and even inventing fictional legal cases to support a position - which might be considered even more serious). Perhaps as both authors and referees, despite the pressures to work ever faster, we should slow down just a little and take a little more care in our citations. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Solomon Vidal who suggested the idea of checking the citations of Horton (1940) once I had discovered that it was never actually submitted. References Beven, K J, 20004, Robert Horton’s perceptual model of infiltration, Hydrological Processes , 18, 3447-3460. Beven, K. J., 2021, The era of infiltration, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences , 25 (2): 851-866, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2020-308 Horton, R.E., 1940, The infiltration-theory of surface runoff, Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 21(2):541 Sherman, L.K., 1935. Report of the Committee on Rainfall and Runoff, 1934–35, Appendix C. The Infiltration Theory of Surface-Runoff. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union ,16(2), pp. 416-419 Wood, H.W., 1942, Flood flow on Missouri Streams, University of Missouri, available at https://www.mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/63035 (last accessed 14.01.2025) Information & Authors Information Version history V1 Version 1 20 February 2025 Peer review timeline Published Hydrological Processes Version of Record 18 Mar 2025 Published Copyright This work is licensed under a Non Exclusive No Reuse License. Collection Hydrological Processes Keywords infiltration theory leroy sherman robert horton spurious citations surface runoff Authors Affiliations Keith Beven 0000-0001-7465-3934 [email protected] Lancaster University Lancaster Environment Centre View all articles by this author Metrics & Citations Metrics Article Usage 305 views 359 downloads .FvxKWukQNSOunydq8rnd { width: 100px; } Citations Download citation Keith Beven. Working ever faster – or the curious case of Horton (1940). Authorea . 20 February 2025. 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