Session Description:
Medical researchers call it cannabis. Criminologists call it marijuana. Online discovery tools search both terms simultaneously. So how should librarians talk about this, or other politicized topics, when discussing keywords with students? What about when implementing discovery tools with proprietary search algorithms? This paper presents a systematic review of scholarly literature using the terms cannabis and marijuana to determine the context that has guided what words are used to describe this drug over time. This reviews implications go far beyond one example, however, and speak to the larger need for librarians to be critical of how we describe politically-charged topics.
