Research on the benefits of nature to people: How much overlap is there in citations and terms for ‘nature’ across disciplines?

Abstract

Research on the diverse benefits of nature to people is characterised by a broad range of disciplines involved, encompassing a variety of approaches, methods and terminologies. While a diversity of approaches is valuable, it can lead to difficulties in integrating and sharing findings, and could form a barrier to effective knowledge exchange, hindering the development and applications of research outputs. As a starting point for this scoping review, we chose four broad research areas (medicine, psychology, education and environment), selected to represent disparate approaches to research on the benefits of nature to people, within and across which to explore overlap in citations and terms used to describe nature. We conducted expert consultation and a snowball‐based approach to source publications, resulting in a sample of 210 papers spanning multiple disciplines within each of our four research areas. For each paper, we recorded the discipline of the journal in which it was published (publishing discipline), the discipline of its first author (first‐author discipline), the number of times journals of each discipline were cited in their bibliographies (cited discipline) and the term(s) used in the paper's title or abstract to describe the aspect of nature being explored (nature term). The cited disciplines were significantly different between publishing and first‐author disciplines, with papers from psychology, education and public health citing distinct communities of papers. However, disciplines generally cite a wide range of other disciplines, with articles in medical journals being particularly broadly cited. Nature terms were significantly different between publishing and first‐author disciplines, with some degree of consistency within disciplines (e.g. education papers consistently used a narrow range of nature terms, such as ‘outdoor learning’). However, there was a notably high range of nature terms used within psychology and public health papers, indicating that research from these disciplines may be particularly prone to being overlooked by search strings. The wide range of disciplines cited is encouraging, since this indicates that diverse research areas are generally aware of each other's work. However, to avoid unnecessary expansion of nature terms and support searchability, we propose four key terms for nature: (‘outdoor learning’ OR ‘outdoor education’), (‘nature’ OR ‘natural’), (‘green space’ OR ‘greenspace’) and (‘biodiversity’ or ‘trees’), which could be used across disciplines. We particularly propose that at least one of these be included in every paper, and all four should be included in review search strings. This is likely to result in a better understanding of the valuable, disparate contributions made by different disciplines to this expanding and important topic. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.