Subject Guide: Agriculture

A step-by-step approach for finding secondary and primary literature in all areas of Agriculture and related disciplines.

Questions? Please contact me (engelk@grinnell.edu).

Evaluate

… questions to ask about the information you find; how appropriate and valuable is the information? A worksheet to go along with the questions.

This is the most important part of any search for information!

Take charge of the information in your life:
Seek information, not affirmation
Source + Motivation = Value

Dig deeper–do not rely on just one source
Understanding is key


Primary and Secondary Literature:

Secondary literature looks like this or this …
Primary literature looks like thisthis, or this … (note the format–IntroductionMethodsResultsDiscussionReferences)
How to use and understand primary literature?

Please be aware when searching for information —


Define

Research question/understand and define a topic
… what is the question(s) you are trying to answer? These secondary sources can help you —
*topic ideas
*understand concepts
*answer fact questions
*discover search terms, phrases, and names
*focus a research question
Remember, true research is rarely a straight path.
Strategian Science (blog):
Good sources to help you understand and link to primary literature:
Science News
New Scientist
Scientific American
New York Times
The Washington Post

Review sources:
Science Bibliographies (Strategian)
Annual Reviews
Trends in …

Identify

Identify
… these sources can help you find evidence to answer your question or validate/invalidate an answer.
OKAY: Google Scholar
Use the “Advanced Search”; can also be used as a tool to focus a broad search (try out search terms, find a possibility, search that possibility in a disciplinary database, and then use the indexing to more precisely find additional papers).
BETTER: Science Primary Literature 
Includes articles, book chapters, and images that have been used and cited by multiple college students and have been highly cited in the scientific literature. Links to full text are provided; some full text is directly available.
Database help

BEST: AGRICOLA
“AGRICOLA (AGRICultural OnLine Access), a database produced by the National Agricultural Library (NAL), consists of two subsets of records. The first contains citations for journal articles that include abstracts. The second consists of bibliographic records describing monographs, serials, audiovisual materials and online content from around the world. AGRICOLA includes but is not limited to resources available in the library. The database contains 5,200,000+ records and includes printed works from as far back as the 15th century.”
AGRIS is the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology, a multilingual bibliographic database that connects users directly to a rich collection of research and worldwide technical information on food and agriculture. Maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
WorldCat
Before 1000 BCE to the present. Catalog of millions of books, web resources, and other materials held in libraries worldwide, maintained by OCLC.

Locate

Locate
If the full text is not directly available above, these are the quickest ways to check if you have access to a source —






Questions? Please contact me (engelk@grinnell.edu)