  A recently proposed path-integral bosonization scheme for massive fermions in
$3$ dimensions is extended by keeping the full momentum-dependence of the
one-loop vacuum polarization tensor. This makes it possible to discuss both the
massive and massless fermion cases on an equal footing, and moreover the
results it yields for massless fermions are consistent with the ones of
another, seemingly different, canonical quantization approach to the problem of
bosonization for a massless fermionic field in $3$ dimensions.
