The query is the theory: Why “exact-term” bibliometrics can conflate climate anxiety with broader eco-emotions

Abstract

Bibliometric syntheses help organize rapidly growing literatures, but their validity depends on how constructs are operationalized. Anjum et al. (2026) present an ambitious synthesis, labeled “climate anxiety scholarship,” that maps the growth of publications, collaboration networks, co-citation structures, and keyword patterns from 2000 to 2024. Yet the paper also illustrates a key challenge in fast-growing fields: literature syntheses built on search terms and labels can outpace the conceptual distinctions they are meant to capture. Our central claim is that the article maps a corpus labeled as “climate anxiety scholarship,” even though the query and the resulting thematic structure extend beyond climate anxiety proper to include adjacent eco-emotions that are conceptually distinct from anxiety-related phenomena. “Exact-term” search strategies may be precise about strings while remaining imprecise about constructs, especially when anxiety terms are combined with eco-emotions such as grief, despair, solastalgia, and generic “climate/eco-emotions.” This construct blur invites jingle–jangle problems, muddies thematic clusters, and weakens clinical interpretability by treating distinct constructs as interchangeable. Two remedies follow: sensitivity analyses contrasting climate-anxiety-specific and broader eco-emotions corpora, and stronger ontological discipline specifying which constructs are targeted and how they relate (e.g., overlaps-with, is-a, part-of). In bibliometrics, the query is the theory; disciplined queries yield interpretable maps and clinically actionable insights.