Towards Visualizing Oceanographic Bibliometric Data Across Canada

Abstract. Global Environmental Assessments like the United Nations World Ocean Assessment II (WOA II) draw on thousands of scientific articles, but the bibliographic metadata for those articles records where researchers work — not where they conducted their research. A study of Arctic sea ice by a Dalhousie researcher is catalogued as Halifax. This gap makes it difficult to ask basic questions about which marine regions are being studied. We built a prototype system to extract and map research locations from articles referenced in WOA II. Using OpenAlex for bibliographic metadata and spaCy for named entity recognition, we identify place names in article abstracts, geocode them using the Canadian Geographical Names Database and GeoNames, and display them alongside institutional affiliations on an interactive map. Manual review of 68 articles shows the system performs well for studies referencing named geological or physical features in northern Canada but struggles with administrative place names in southern regions where ambiguity is higher. The tool is a first step toward spatial bibliometric analysis that maps where ocean science is done, not just who does it.