The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Breaking the Sod: Humankind, History, and Soil
Abstract
For most of history, few things have mattered more to human communities than their relations with soil, because soil provided most of their food and nutrients. Accordingly, some of the earliest written documents were agricultural manuals intended to organize, preserve, and impart soil knowledge. Indeed, ancient civilizations often worshipped the soil as the foundry of life itself. For the past century or two, nothing has mattered more for soils than their relations with human communities, because human action inadvertently ratcheted up rates of soil erosion and, both intentionally and unintentionally, rerouted nutrient flows.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 10
- 10.1177/095968369400400311 · DOI
- H. Dregne, in Determinants of Soil Loss Tolerance, American Society of Agronomy Special Publication No. 45 (American Society of Agronomy, Madison, WI, 1982), pp. 1–14.
- 10.2307/4140916 · DOI
- J. R. McNeill The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press New York 1992).
- V. Smil Enriching the Earth (MIT Press Cambridge MA 2001). · DOI · Paper page
- R. Wasson in Towards a World Environmental History of Soils J. R. McNeill V. Winiwarter Eds. (Oregon State Univ. Press Corvallis OR in press).
- F. Bray Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 6: Biology and Biological Control. Part 2: Agriculture (Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1984).
- 10.1016/S0016-7061(03)00071-5 · doi:10.1016/s0016-7061(03)00071-5
- 10.1038/35030260 · DOI · Paper page
- V. Winiwarter, in Shifting Boundaries of the Real: Making the Invisible Visible, H. Novotny, M. Weiss, Eds. (Hochschulverlag, Zürich, 2000), pp. 137–156.
Cited by
Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security
Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Waha, K., Jarvis, L., Kremen, C., Herrero, M., & Rieseberg, L. H. (2018) · Annual Review of Plant Biology · doi:10.1146/annurev-arplant-042817-040256 · Cited by 954
Crossing Disciplines and Scales to Understand the Critical Zone
Brantley, S. L., Goldhaber, M. B., & Ragnarsdottir, K. V. (2007) · Elements · doi:10.2113/gselements.3.5.307 · Cited by 697
Soil “ecosystem” services and natural capital: critical appraisal of research on uncertain ground
Baveye, P. C., Baveye, J., & Gowdy, J. (2016) · Frontiers in Environmental Science · doi:10.3389/fenvs.2016.00041 · Cited by 446
Linking Ecology and Economics for Ecosystem Management
FARBER, S., COSTANZA, R., CHILDERS, D. L., ERICKSON, J., GROSS, K., GROVE, M., HOPKINSON, C. S., KAHN, J., PINCETL, S., TROY, A., et al. (2006) · BioScience · doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2006)056[0121:leaefe]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 445
Humic Substances in Soils: Are They Really Chemically Distinct?
Kelleher, B. P., & Simpson, A. J. (2006) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/es0608085 · Cited by 379
Metadata
- Authors
- McNeill, J. R., & Winiwarter, V.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2004-06-11
- Volume
- 304
- Issue
- 5677
- Pages
- 1627-1629
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2021208321
- Cited by
- 192
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 12.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Breaking the Sod: Humankind, History, and Soil. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1099893
- The paper
- McNeill, J. R., & Winiwarter, V. (2004). Breaking the Sod: Humankind, History, and Soil. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1099893
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
