LibGuides: Soil Sci 531: Find Scholarly/Peer-Reviewed Research

Essential Agriculture Scholarly Databases

You can find scholarly research by searching a large multidisciplinary databases or by a searching smaller agricultural-specific database.

There are advantages to each database. If I'm really trying to be thorough, I will utilize several databases.

Note: There may be significant, but not complete, overlap in coverage within these databases.

Best Databases for Finding Agricultural Science Research

The Washington State University Library Catalog (Search It) locates pretty much everything you'd hope to find on a subject. This includes journal articles, books, newspapers, multimedia, extension resources, archival materials, etc. You will get the most search results using Search It.

Web of Science is a mostly STEM database. Although it will return less search results than Search It, they will typically be more scholarly. Web of Science has a terrific interface which allows the user to easily find useful research based on articles they have already found.

AGRICOLA is an agricultural sciences scholarly database. This database will return less search results than the previous two databases, but those results will more pertinent to your research. AGRICOLA is maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Library.

If you are interested in what databases are available to you at WSU, check out this comprehensive list.

Other Useful Scholarly Databases

BIOSIS Previews
BIOSIS Previews¨ is the online version of Biological Abstracts¨ and Biological Abstracts/RRM¨ (Reports, Reviews, and Meetings), the largest collection of biological sciences records in the world.
AGRIS (FAO)
AGRIS is the international information system for the agricultural sciences and technology. It was created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 1974, to facilitate information exchange and to bring together world literature dealing with all aspects of agriculture. AGRIS is a cooperative system in which participating countries input references to the literature produced within their boundaries and, in return, draw on the information provided by the other participants. To date, 240 national, international and intergovernmental centers participate.
ASABE Technical Library
This site provides access to the publications of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers: Standards, Journals, some annual and section meeting papers, conference proceedings and assorted other publications.

SciFindern Scholar
This service works best with Internet Explorer. First time users MUST register. Full text access to: Chemical Abstracts since 1907, Chemical Abstracts Registry CASREACT: since 1974, Medline since 1985, Chemcats and ChemList since 1979. To learn how to get the most out of CAS SciFinderN, see the SciFinder FAQ and collection of on-demand training videos, webinars, and how-to guides.
PubMed
This link to PubMed is for those affiliated with WSU. PubMed comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

Utilizing Google Scholar & The WSU Libraries

Google Scholar has its benefits and drawbacks. It's certainly not my go-to database when doing scholarly research but it can be useful.

If you are using Google Scholar I recommend you utilize "Library Links" in Google Scholar. By doing this you will link Google Scholar to the WSU Libraries' catalog. This will make some items more discoverable and will also allow you to open subscription full-text PDFs in Google Scholar,

Follow these steps to sync the WSU Libraries' catalog to Google Scholar (click on any image to make it larger).

1. Go to scholar.google.com and select the hamburger menu (three short parallel lines) in the upper left

2. Select Settings,

3. Select Library Links

4. Do a search for Washington State University and select all options

Note: that I have also selected Open WorldCat; this will offer you the chance to move from the freely available Open WorldCat to the WSU Libraries WorldCat Discovery catalog (this is a great resource for locating books not available in Search It or via Summit ). Open WorldCat should be there by default, but if it is not just search and add the links for the WSU Libraries, then do another search for Open WorldCat and add it then.