Library tutorial for agricultural, animal & veterinary sciences

Which database?
Linking to the database (example using CAB Abstracts)
Entering the search
Displayed citations
Evaluating your research results
Reducing the number of citations
Increasing the number of citations
Finding the full journal article

• searching for keywords or index terms (descriptors), authors or journal titles
• entering search terms with Boolean or logical operators and truncation symbols
• displaying brief or full references
• marking useful references, saving or printing references
• adjusting searches with new terms, limits, thesaurus terms etc .

Look at this search example, which is intended as a guide to approaching searches. Topic: nutrition of organically farmed pigs

Which database?

CAB Abstracts is useful for agricultural topics. You should also consider searching other databases
such as Biosis Previews and Pubmed (Medline), important biological or biomedical databases for animal, plant and microbial biology.
See Section 4 part 1 (Choosing Databases) of this tutorial for more information about how to locate relevant databases.

Linking to CAB Abstracts

Search for CAB abstracts in the Library catalogue - go to its full record display and follow the link at Link to e-Resource OR link to the database from the Agriculture Resource Guide. (Note: some databases have license restrictions on the number of concurrent users:
if you are unable to access the database, please be patient and try again later)

Entering the search

• Select the timespan you want to search.  You can select a range of years.
• CAB Abstracts database covers 1910 to current, so you may wish to restrict your search to the
last few years, if you only want current information.
• The topic's key concepts are pigs, nutrition, organic
Consider alternative and related terms (synonyms, plurals etc.) for each concept, e.g. nutrition, feeds, feeding If you can't think of many terms:
•     do a preliminary search to find a few articles and examine their titles, abstracts and keywords for useful terms
•     do some background reading to gather more terms.
•     try the online CAB Thesaurus, which is a very useful tool to find narrower, broader and related terms.
   The Thesaurus is accessed from the Search screen.
• Enter search terms in the Topic field, connected with Boolean operators, e.g. AND, OR and NOT, e.g.
  pigs and (nutrition or feed*) and organic Make sure you remember to include the asterisk * for truncation and the brackets around the words linked by OR

Note: the CAB Thesaurus specifies that pigs is the preferred term in the database, rather than swine or Sus domesticus etc. See an explanation of the CAB Thesaurus below.


• To limit the search by language (e.g. English), or publication type (e.g. journal article) select from the drop down boxes at the right hand side of the Search screen:

Displayed citations

Citations (records) containing your terms are displayed

• To display abstracts and keywords (descriptors) for an article, click its title. To mark a record for printing, downloading or emailing, click the box next to its record number.
  To print, save or email citations, choose the records and fields you want from the options at the top of the list.
• You can also add citations to a marked list, then when you have finished all searches choose Marked list on the top tool bar and save all citations at once.
• If you save results you can open the file later in your own word processor or database management program
such as EndNote (More information about EndNote is available here.   On some databases, including CAB Abstracts, you can directly export your results to EndNote.

Evaluating your search results

Often the first search you try will not give a result that suits your purposes so you need to adjust it. The methods for changing searches vary in different databases but there are certain pattern that you can look for, using help screens or the Library's database guides where necessary.

Reducing the number of citations

For example, you don't have time to read and evaluate a lot of detailed articles if you have a 1000 word essay (as compared to a research project).  You can often reduce a large result by:

• limiting to articles in English: look for a Limit or Language or English button.

( In CAB Abstracts use: Refine results > Languages)

• limiting to review articles which survey developments in a field rather than report on very specific research: look for a Limit, Document type or Publication type button or search for the term 'reviews' in the descriptor field. (In CAB Abstracts, use:Search within results, and search for 'reviews')

• searching terms in title and descriptor fields only to avoid minor mentions in abstracts

• looking at abstracts and descriptor fields for good citations to get an idea of useful terms,then redoing the search with those terms

(In CAB Abstracts, use Refine results > Descriptors).

• limiting searches to recent journal articles, since books often have good surveys of earlier work but lack recent work

• using a database's thesaurus to find alternative search terms; some databases have useful thesauri
which suggest related terms for a topic and work well for searching a group of terms or general concepts (example below, using CAB Abstracts):

Example of adjusting your search to either limit your results or expand your results in CAB Abstracts

 On the results screen, click on Refine results on the left hand side Select a check box, e.g. Descriptors, to display a ranked list of items extracted  from records on the results screen.

 Select one or more check boxes and click Refine to display only the items that contain the selected items.

 You can also enter another term in the Search within results for textbox, to narrow the search further.

Another method to limit or expand your results:

At the main search screen, click on the dropdown box on the right hand side and select Descriptors.

Then click on the magnifying glass, which will lead to the CAB Thesaurus. This is a list of controlled terms, called descriptors.Type nutrition in the search box.

Click on  next to animal nutrition to view thesaurus details. Related terms, broader terms and narrower terms are displayed.The screen will look like this:

Click the Add button next to any term, to add it to the text box at the bottom of the page. You can click multiple terms.Click OK to transfer the selected term(s) to the search page.

The selected terms will now be automatically inserted into the search page. Other terms can be typed
in the search boxes. Extra search boxes can be displayed by clicking on Add another field. See example below:

After searching these keywords, click on Search History. The searches done in this session are displayed.
The example below is the result of these search examples. There are considerably fewer citations resulting from the search using the descriptor fields only, however they may be more relevant.
Searching using the Thesaurus searches only the Descriptors, Broad Descriptors, Geographic Location and Organism Descriptors fields.

Increasing the number of citations

Sometimes a search will produce too small a result. You can try to extend it by:

• rethinking your topic: does it have broader aspects? does it form part of a wider topic
that you could search?

• rethinking the terms you use: try subject dictionaries for alternative terms or look for possible
  terms in any relevant articles your search has found
• using a database's thesaurus to find alternative search terms; some databases have useful thesauri
  which suggest related terms for a topic and work well for searching a group of terms or general concepts.
• noting the author of relevant articles and searching for other articles by the same author: look for an
  author search button or index button or, in some databases, click a link for the author's name

Finding the full journal article

A database search gives a list of citations.
A database citation may give a link to an full text electronic article, as in the example below:

If there is no link or a faulty link to the full text, the Library may still have the article in print or electronic form.
Therefore always search the Library catalogue under journal title to find the call number and location.

See the Library online tutorial How do I find a journal article in the catalogue or the Catalogue demo Searching by journal title if you need reminding how.

• For an electronic journal, link to the required volume, issue and pages.
• For a print journal, note the location and call number and find the required volume in the Library collections.
  
  

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Back to tutorial main page | Continue to Section 5: Evaluate your results