From Scopus we extracted the research papers containing the word ‘soil’ in the title that on July 13th 2018 counted more than 500 citations. From this collection of 310 papers we excluded the unobtainable ones (in orange), those that do not contain original data or report aggregated data not attributable to any single soil (in green), and those clearly not dealing with soil in spite of the title (in yellow). So, we selected 174 suitable papers, which were checked for i) the presence of the soil name (according to any classification system) in the main text, the Supplementary Materials, external databases linked to the paper, or publications quoted in the main paper, and ii) the following info: geographic coordinates of the sampled soil, particle size distribution/texture class, pH, organic carbon content, cation exchange capacity, and any other ancillary soil data.

This dataset refers to the Viewpoint published in Environ. Sci. Technol., doi: 10.1021/acs.est.9b03050