Coverage:

AGRICOLA – AGRICultural OnLine Access is an online a bibliographic database of citations to the agricultural literature created by the National Agricultural Library (NAL). Coverage for AGRICOLA dates back to 1979 and includes more than 2.5 million citations. AGRICOLA contains citations to articles from numerous agricultural journals, reports, and chapters from books. The database also includes citations to AV materials, serials, monographs, and other material in the NAL collection. AGRICOLA is an excellent database to search the periodical literature for any topic related to agriculture (including animal sciences, agricultural economics, agronomy, aquaculture and fisheries, entomology, farming, forestry, plant sciences, etc.); coverage is particularly strong in the areas of USDA serials and monographs, and experiment station and extension publications. The LSU Libraries subscribes to AGRICOLA through EBSCO, which offers the added advantage of linking directly to many full-text articles.

Accessing the Database:

Available on the LSU campus. Off-campus access available to LSU students, faculty & staff.
1.    Visit the LSU Libraries web site at www.lib.lsu.edu and click on “Indexes & Databases” listed under “Research Tools”.
2.    Select the letter “A” from the alphabet listed under “Databases by Title”. Then click on the title of the database –                        off-campus access available to LSU affiliates by entering your Tiger Card ID number (17 digits, no dash) from your Tiger          Card. Your pin is “changeme” (without quotes) until you change it.

Searching Tips:

The database defaults to the Advanced Search screen – users can improve search results by using Boolean operators, truncation, or by searching specific fields in AGRICOLA.

Boolean Operators: Use the Boolean operators “AND”, “OR”, or “NOT” (upper or lower case) to respectively narrow, broaden, and exclude search terms.

For example:

Soil AND Water retrieves citations that refer to both “Soil” and “Water” (You can append several terms together using “AND” to define your search and reduce the number of results.)

Soil AND Water OR Greenhouse finds results that reference the terms “Soil” and “Water”, or the term “Greenhouse”. (The OR operator broadens the search – linked by this operator, your words are searched simultaneously and independently of each other.

Soil OR Water NOT Greenhouse to find results that contain the terms "Soil" or "Water" but not the term "Greenhouse". (The NOT operator excludes terms.)

Without parentheses, a search is executed from left to right. Words combined by operators enclosed in parentheses are searched first, and help control a search query.

General search without parenthesis: Soil or Water and Greenhouse or Sunlight will retrieves everything on "Soil" as well as references to the terms "Water" and "Greenhouse", and everything on "Sunlight".

Search with parenthesis: (Soil or Water) and (Greenhouse or Sunlight) finds articles about "Soil" or "Water" that reference "Greenhouse" or "Sunlight".

Truncation: Use asterisk truncation after the root of a search term to find all forms of the word – e.g. gen* finds gene, genes, genetics, genetically.

Field Searching:  Select a field to search using the pull-down menu – search by author, title, series, subject, source (journal title), conference, language, category codes or any of the other AGRICOLA fields appearing in the menu.

Select “Default Fields” to simultaneously search all of the following fields: Title, Translated Title, Author, Author Affiliation, Corporate Author, Conference, Source, Publisher, Abstract, Subject, Identifiers, Descriptors, Series Statement, Subset, Level.

E-mailing Records:

1.    Click on the folder next to the record(s) you wish to email.
2.    Click on the “Folder has items” icon above your search results.
3.    Click on E-mail – enter email address and a subject line.
4.    Select items in addition to the brief citation to email (additional citation details & abstract, HTML Full Text – when                      available, or PDF Full Text – when available.)

Saving/Printing Records:

1.    Click on the folder next to the record(s) you wish to save or print.
2.    Click on the “Folder has items” icon above your search results.
3.    Click on “Save to Disk” or “Print” to bring up either the “Save Manager” or “Print Manager”
4.    Select items in addition to the brief citation to print or save (additional citation details & abstract, HTML Full Text – when        available.)
5.    The PDF will not save or print from your browser window. You must open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader, and use            the Reader's save/print capability.