  Within computational neuroscience, informal interactions with modelers often
reveal wildly divergent goals. In this opinion piece, we explicitly address the
diversity of goals that motivate and ultimately influence modeling efforts. We
argue that a wide range of goals can be meaningfully taken to be of highest
importance. A simple informal survey conducted on the Internet confirmed the
diversity of goals in the community. However, different priorities or
preferences of individual researchers can lead to divergent model evaluation
criteria. We propose that many disagreements in evaluating the merit of
computational research stem from differences in goals and not from the
mechanics of constructing, describing, and validating models. We suggest that
authors state explicitly their goals when proposing models so that others can
judge the quality of the research with respect to its stated goals.
