Plain Language Summary: Research on the benefits of nature to people: How well are researchers talking to each other?

By Kate Howlett and Edgar C Turner.

Read the full paper here.

There is now a vast body of research on the benefits of nature to people, so vast, in fact, that it spans many different disciplines, including medicine, psychology, education, ecology and many more. Each discipline brings its own set of approaches, methods and terminologies. While such a diversity of approaches is valuable, it might also lead to difficulties in sharing results. Specifically, suppose different disciplines use different terms to refer to the same thing, or different methods to measure the same thing. With these differences, it can be difficult for researchers to find each other’s work through search engines, or to understand and interpret each other’s results. In practice, this could be hindering the development of future research, or the application of findings.

We wanted to know whether researchers from disparate disciplines were citing each other’s work and whether they were using the same terms to describe “nature.” To do this, we identified four broad research areas, which we felt used particularly distinct approaches and terminologies: medicine, psychology, education and environment. After consulting experts on the topic of nature’s benefits to people, and going through the bibliographies of lots of papers, we arrived at a sample of 210 papers, which spanned the 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 its bibliography (cited discipline) and the term(s) used in the paper’s title or abstract to describe the aspect of nature being explored (nature term).

We found that papers published in journals of different disciplines, and written by researchers from different disciplines, cited different communities of disciplines in their bibliographies. Papers from psychology, education and public health cited particularly distinct communities of papers in their bibliographies. However, a wide range of other disciplines was generally being cited, with articles in medical journals being particularly broadly cited. This is encouraging, since it suggests that researchers from diverse disciplines are generally aware of each other’s work. We also found that papers published in journals of different disciplines, and written by researchers from different disciplines, are using different terms to describe nature. For example, education papers consistently used a narrow range of nature terms, such as ‘outdoor learning’, while there was a notably high range of terms used within psychology and public health papers. This suggests that research from psychology and public health is particularly prone to being overlooked by researchers when using search engines, given the wide range of terms being used.

To avoid work from other disciplines being missed by researchers, we propose four key terms for nature: (‘outdoor learning’ OR ‘outdoor education’), (‘nature’ OR ‘natural’), (‘green space’ OR ‘greenspace’) and (‘biodiversity’ or ‘trees’). We suggest that at least one of these should be included in every paper, and that all four should be included when using search engines. This is likely to result in better understanding of the valuable, disparate contributions made by different disciplines to this expanding and important topic.