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

  The research of my paper led me to how nature benefits us and why philosophers care about it. This paper told me this question is hard to answer since each research conducted uses different terms, making it difficult to find in a systematic search. Some answers are rendered irrelevant due to their smaller understanding, as they only looked at one aspect and not the whole. However, it is still important when answering how nature helps the mind, body, and soul. For example, Rebecca Lovell’s research studied how biodiverse environments are health-promoting, but only focused on children, and incorporating the heterogeneity of utilizing a narrative synthesis methodology to accommodate the diversity found within the literature, her research when compared next to Chawla, does not cite each other despite having a common theme. Chawla’s research focused on the advantages relevant to children, which entail an educational or school-related aspect, while Lovell’s aimed to delineate evidence of health and well-being benefits given from nature, which could be directly encompassed with educational aspects. They identified four disparate research areas: medicine, psychology, education, and environment; which provided a comprehensive overview of research examining the advantages and benefits found in nature. They used a compilation of ten benchmark papers based on our familiarity with the literature, in attempts to encompass the diverse approaches and terminologies used within the four research areas. Their primary objective was to promote the utilization of nature-related terminology, enabling papers to gain recognition in other research contexts. They aimed to achieve this by advocating for the adoption of more specific nature terms, with the hope that these recommendations, over time, would result in a reduction of the variety of nature terms employed within disciplines. This approach seeks to prevent unnecessary proliferation as the body of literature expands and enhances the efficiency of knowledge exchange among the diverse disciplines contributing to this uniquely broad field of research. I'm glad I learned this information, as I plan on using it in my paper.