Environmental Justice Research Guide: Useful 'EJ' Keywords

A variety of terms may be used by different authors, journals and databases to express ideas or concepts relating to environmental justice. The productivity of your searches and the relevance of your search results will increase when your search strategies incorporate different ways to express concepts such as:

• Environmental Justice:  Depending on your scope of interest, consider using terms that are closely related in meaning, or which express a more specific scope, such as: Environmental Health Justice, Environmental Racism, or Ecojustice. Consider also the variety of language used by different authors to express the concept of justice--including, for example: injustice, equity, inequity, equality, inequality, disparities, racism, discrimination. Note that the term justice has other meanings, depending on the context (e.g. "Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States").

• Environmental Advocacy: Other terms commonly used to express this and related concepts include: environmentalism, environmental activism, environmental activists, environmentalists, green movement. For finding materials relating to environmental issues (or environmentalism), also consider the use of single word terms, such as: advocacy, advocate, activism, activists, movements, protests.

• Socioeconomic factors: Some of the terms used to express this concept might include: poverty, income, socioeconomic status, socioeconomic indicators.

• Race & Ethnicity: Terms used to express these concepts could include: race, racial, racism, African Americans, Black persons, Black people, Black, people of color, BIPOC, ethnicity, minorities, minority groups, Latinos, Latinas, Latinx, Latin Americans, Hispanics, Hispanic Americans, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Americans, Native Americans, American Indians, and depending on your research focus, the identities of specific Native American tribes/groups.

• Age factors: Aged, old age, very old, elderly, geriatric, ageism, ageist.

• Gender factors: Some of the most commonly-used terms may include, but are not limited to: LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (in your searches, it's usually best to include both the acronym and its respective fully spelled-out phrase).

When conducting a search, the database is looking for matches between the keywords you use, and the words that appear in the articles you're looking for (e.g. in the article titles, abstracts, or subject headings).

As you will notice in your search results, different authors, journals and publishers may use different words or phrases to express a single concept that you're interested in (e.g. urban OR cities; forests OR woodland; global warming OR climate change).

For your searches to be efficient in retrieving information on your topic, you therefore need to incorporate those alternate terms into your search strategy.

A great way to gather and keep track of all those different keywords is a 'keyword worksheet.' It's simply a sheet or page divided into several boxes, each one containing a separate list of words or phrases used to express one of the main concepts in your topic or research question.