Hypersensitivity pneumonitis secondary to exposure to avian antigens is referred to in the literature as bird fancier’s lung and numerous other names (hereafter “BFL…”).

This scoping review aims to identify terms used for “BFL…” in the peer-reviewed literature between 1960 and 2021.

We included peer-reviewed articles referring to “BFL…” in humans and published between 1960 and 2021 in English. We searched Medline, Embase, CINAHL, Scopus, and Web of Science, and extracted terms used for “BFL…” along with the year of publication. We categorised the names into occupation-, pathology-, aetiology-, aetio-pathological-, and occupation- and pathology-based terms. We then calculated the total number of terms used, the individual and category-specific frequencies of use for each term, as well as the overall and decade-specific average number of articles to be read in order to encounter a new term.

From 3194 initially screened articles, we found 114 terms used for “BFL…” in 1101 articles included for final review. The most frequently used terms were pigeon breeder's disease, bird fancier's lung, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, pigeon breeder's lung and extrinsic allergic alveolitis (in that order), accounting for 65.2 % of terms found. Similarly, occupation-based terms accounted for 67.1 % of terms identified. On average, a new term for “BFL…” was encountered for every 9–10 articles included in the review.

The term to be used for “BFL…” should be standardised in the peer-reviewed literature. We suggest “bird fancier lung” be used as the term for hypersensitivity pneumonitis secondary to exposure to avian antigens.

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