http://www.fao.org/agora
This module is part of the AGORA Basic Course. The AGORA Basic Course highlights the baseline skills necessary to use the AGORA program effectively and efficiently. The AGORA programme (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. Module 2 covers Searching Skills; Evaluating Web Sites.
3. Steps 1-4: Example – water management
issues AND rice production
1. Ask: What water management issues are associated
with rice production?
2. Need: scholarly primary research
3. Main Concepts: water, management, rice, production
4. Select terms:
a) Broader terms: ‘cereal’, ‘cultivation’, ‘farming’,
b) Synonyms: H2O, farming/cultivation, usage/
issues/complications
c) Alternative spellings: none
d) Plurals: cereal(s)
e) Capitalization: be aware of relevancy ranking
5. Step 6. Search: Construct a search using the
appropriate commands and best practices
Question: What water management issues are
associated with rice production?
Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3 Concept 4
water management pollutionriceissues
5. rice
6. cereal
3. issues
4. problems
1. water
management
2. water usage
9 = 1 OR 2 10 = 3 OR 4 11 = 5 OR 6 12 = 7 OR 8
7. production
8. cultivation
13 = 9 AND 10 AND 11 AND 12
6. Step 7. Revise
Review and refine your search
• Be prepared to review/revise your search
• Keep your search terms in concept
sets/zones but remember to explore subtopics
• Try new sources of information
• Save the search and citations for future use
• Promote use of high-quality resources
7. Step 8. Manage Results
Step 9. Evaluate-Who? What? When? Where? Why?
• Download, print, save, e-mail results & search history
• Cite using a scientific citation style
• Save search, set up alerts
• Accuracy
• Authority
• Objectivity
• Currency
• Coverage
Step 10. Apply – Answer the question.
8. Boolean Operators
AND Operator
(to combine two concepts)
the AND operator is used to combine two
concepts e.g. livestock AND drought – results
are in the combined area of the two circles
livestock drought
9. the AND operator is used to combine three
concepts e.g. bean AND cultivation AND pests -
in the combined area of the three circles
bean cultivation
AND Operator
(to combine three concepts)
pests
10. the OR is a means of combining synonyms e.g.
beans OR legumes - in each circle’s area with the
overlap in the middle having both search terms
beans legumes
OR Operator
(info containing one or other term)
11. NOT Operator
(in one term or the other)
pig NOT guinea – in the shaded area; eliminates
items in 2nd term (guinea) or both terms
12. Other search engine functions
• Phrase or proximity searching: “…” or (…)
– allows you to search for an exact phrase, e.g.
pests and (bean cultivation)
• Truncation/wildcards: *
– allow you to search alternative spellings and
plurals
river* for river OR rivers
pesticide* for pesticide OR pesticides
program* for programme or program
• Alternate spellings: ?
– can be used to substitute for characters anywhere
in a word
wom?n for woman or women
13. Africa AND (bean OR maize)
bean maize
Africa
Africa AND (bean or maize) – in the shaded area
The (OR) operator retains items in each term and the AND
operator is used to combine two concepts
14. More Search Techniques
• Field Specific Searching
– author, title, journal, date, url, etc.
• Language Restrictions, Humans or Animals and
other limits
• Relevancy Ranking
– a grading that gives extra weight to a document
when the search terms appear in the headline or
are capitalized
– every found document is calculated as 100%
multiply by the angle formed by weights vector for
request and weights vector for document found
15. Evaluating Web Information
• Criteria for Evaluation
- Accuracy
- Authority
- Currency
- Coverage
- Objectivity
- Design/Navigation
16. This is the Google search engine
- www.google.com
Queries are typed into the Search
box – AGORA FAO in this case
17. The results for a maize
production search in Google
is 18,100,000 – including links to
many types of resources.
18. Google Scholar –
scholar.google.com
provides a simple way to broadly
search for scholarly literature
This is the Scholar search engine
-scholar.google.com
Queries are typed into the Search
box – maize production in this case
19. The results for the maize production
search is 1,480,000 citations with
primarily academic type material
20. CAB Abstracts and AGORA
• CAB generously offers a subset of CAB
Abstracts to AGORA users
• Also provides full-text articles found in AGORA
• Covers 50% of journals in AGORA
• To search in CAB Abstracts, you must be logged
into AGORA.
• After completing a search in CAB Abstracts, you
can return to AGORA to access the full-text
article – if you are properly logged in to AGORA.
Note: AGORA covers many general topics such as management, economics, research, law, population, statistics, etc.
not covered by CAB. With the implementation of Summon, you will be able to search probably 95% of what is in
AGORA, if not more.
21. The same search terms
– maize production -
will be completed in CAB Abstracts
23. Exercises
This is the end of the AGORA Basic
Course Module 2.
Complete the exercises for Modules 1
and 2.
Then, please continue with AGORA
Basic Course Module 3: AGORA Portal
Updated February 2015
Hinweis der Redaktion
This module is part of the AGORA Basic Course.
The AGORA programme (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of more than 5700 key journals and 4100 books to 2800 institutions in more than 100 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world. AGORA is one of the four programmes that make up Research4Life: AGORA, HINARI, OARE and ARDI.
This Section of the AGORA Basic Course is an overview of the basic search strategies (Boolean Operators and other techniques) that will be useful when you want to identify specific articles using keywords to search in bibliographic databases. Also covered are how to plan a search strategy, evaluating Internet-based information and comparing keyword search results using Google and Google Scholar.
This and the subsequent slide summarize the steps for effective searching. The initial steps can be completed prior to accessing the Internet and a specific database or resource. This is advisable when there is low-bandwidth and high-cost for Internet access.
In this example, you will see numerous options for this search. Some of these options will enable you to broaden the search while others will limit it.
Note how this search uses both the OR and AND Boolean operators (to be discussed in subsequent slides). First, the OR is used to expand the search. Then, the AND is used to combine terms and make the search more precise.
We now will view a series of searches using the Boolean operators. Using the AND operator makes this search more precise or limited.
Note that the three combined AND terms make the search even more precise/limited.
In contrast to the AND search operator, the OR one expands the search. We have used two terms that are synonyms and have expanded the results.
Using the NOT operator, this search is for livestock pigs (swine) and eliminates any articles about guinea pigs (often used for research experiments). Note that a byproduct of this search also would eliminate any material from the countries ‘Guinea’ and ‘Papua New Guinea’.
A search for (bean cultivation) would include both bean AND cultivation. While many search engines and databases contain these options, the exact terminology may differ [e.g. for proximity searching “…” or (…) ]. For example, in Google, the AND Boolean Operator is automatically used. A search for (bean cultivation) would include both bean AND cultivation.
By combining AND plus proximity searching with the OR operator, we have expanded a search to include to two broad subjects and use a geographic limit.
Relevancy Ranking is the sorting of the results of the search so that the most relevant documents are listed first. With the huge numbers in the Google searches, this ranking is invaluable.
The text in this section uses some material developed by INASP for the ‘Search Engines and Effective Searching on the Web’ presentation. All INASP training materials, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are copyright INASP (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications) and are freely available for use in educational settings.
Since the Internet is a self-publishing medium, the information is not selected by professionals (or in the case of journals, a peer-review process). Information retrieved from the Internet must be evaluated and analyzed for appropriateness for clinical and research purposes. Per the criteria listed in this slide, the key is to remember to use these basic evaluation tools when you view a website for the first time. Also check the url (web address) of each site as this is a key for identifying the reliability of the website.
Google is the world’s most popular search engine with the goal being to ‘organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ Called ‘page rank’, Google introduced a unique concept of determining which pages rank the highest in the results list. When you complete a Google search, the pages with the most links pointing to them from other sites, known as ‘back-links’, are placed higher up in the list because they are considered more popular and thus more relevant.
Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research. From this search engine, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. This search tool aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.
While you will receive links to specific journal articles, you will need to LOGIN to AGORA to access articles from AGORA Partner Publishers. Other material may be freely accessible via the WWW.
Note the links to the PDFs of many citations. If this is an open access journal article or grey literature document, you will get access to the full-text. If the journal article comes from a commercial publisher, you will be asked to pay a fee for the article or be required to use an individual password.
CAB generously provided a subset of the CAB Abstracts database designed specifically for use with AGORA. It covers about 50% of the journals found in AGORA, so you should be able to find most of the citations listed here in full-text. You must log in to search CAB, and must log in to AGORA to gain access to full-text articles. Note: sometimes people will do this in two sessions and must remember to be logged in.
AGORA covers a lot of general topics such as management, economics, research, population, statistics, law, etc. that are not covered by CAB. With the implementation of Summon, you will be able to search probably 95% of what is in AGORA, if not more.
This is a simple search interface that enables you to retrieve results from a number of journals by different publisher. It is similar to the way you would search Google or other search engines using keywords.
Note that, once you enter the database, it notes that you can ‘Search AGORA records from the CAB Abstracts Database’.