This paper takes a step back from the notions of natural amenities and environmental amenities. What are natural and environmental amenities? How are they defined and measured in the scientific literature, and in relations to what research purposes? To answer these questions, we present a review of the (about 225) peer-reviewed quantitative articles published during the period 1989-2013 exhibiting one of these two notions in their titles, abstracts or keywords. We observe a strong trend toward an increasing number of publications per year, and a concentration into five main journals (Ecological Economics being the first). Two main research objectives are followed: recovering implicit prices of natural assets (about 40% of the papers) and understanding their impacts on regional economic development (about 35%). Most articles do not mention any definition of natural or environmental amenities, but move directly to the issue of measuring them. The two notions are not distinguished empirically since they are measured with analogous indicators. Neither are they distinguished theoretically in the papers providing definitions. In these later, we cannot identify a single or even a small set of commonly accepted definitions. Nevertheless, at least seven distinct classes of amenities can be identified, and a huge diversity of measures within each class. Most papers use a set of unidimensional measures of natural/environmental attributes (predominantly landcover/land-use and water-related indicators, and to a lesser extent topographic and climatic indicators). Fewer papers use PCA-based so-called "amenity indices", and even fewer multidimensional indicators stemming from ecological science. Natural/environmental "disamenities" are rarely considered together with natural/environmental amenities.