Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of America?

Abstract

The Gulf of Mexico was recognized as the ‘Gulf of America’, via Presidential executive order in the United States, from February 2025. Renaming geographical or geological sites based on political or nationalist decisions risks places academics, editors, and publishers in complex situations where fact at one point in time may be labelled as false facts or misinformation at another point in time. Until 27 August 2025, 22 documents indexed in Scopus and 18 documents indexed in Web of Science had employed ‘Gulf of America’ in the title, abstract or keywords. Editors who allow authors to publish the term ‘Gulf of America’ are called upon to offer guidance. It is also important to publish the sentiment of those authors (from the US, Mexico, or elsewhere) who have employed ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in indexed academic papers from February 2025 onwards, since those papers might be interpreted as carrying – at least from a US perspective – an error of historical fact. To get a more granular appreciation of the extent of academic implications of this politically influenced toponym, the first 150 of 645 Google Scholar results (27 August 2025) were manually assessed. The analysis shows that the adoption of the politically imposed toponym ‘Gulf of America’ is confined almost entirely to U.S.-affiliated authors, while Gulf of Mexico remains the prevailing term internationally.