AGRIS – facilitating access to African agriculture, science and technology literature
AGRIS facilitates that researchers retrieve agriculture, science and technological information. Africa researchers can use AGRIS to discover literature via the platform and also enables data providers to share their records to AGRIS and increase their collections' visibility.
In order to fully contribute to the global knowledge economy, African scholars need to access both global information resources and locally published works. Access to scientific literature by African scholars and researchers was a challenge in the turn of the century.
However, a number of projects and investments to increase the availability and accessibility of scholarly and scientific literature have been madeavailable to African insitutions in the last 2 decades – these include Research4Life and TEEAL. The Open Access movement has also been instrumental in increasing access to the much needed agricultural information and also facilitated the exposure of African produced research (through repositories).
Between 2003 and 2012, African researchers more than doubled their production of research in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)-based fields (Worldbank, 2014).
A roundup on AGRIS
In the agricultural domain, the International Information System for Agricultural Science and Technology (AGRIS) has been providing a wealth of research and technical information in agriculture worldwide. AGRIS is a service that connects you directly to a wealth of research and technical information on agriculture worldwide.
AGRIS offers more than 8 million links to information produced by research centres, development programs, international and national organizations.
AGRIS facilitates access to the following range of publications - journal articles, monographs, book chapters, and grey literature - including unpublished science and technical reports, theses, dissertations and conference papers.
AGRIS and African terrain
Since the 1970s, AGRIS has been capturing and publishing bibliographic data from AGRIS centres from all over the world.
The AGRIS Centres map
AGRIS has received content from more than 40 African countries, there are 54 African countries and 47 African countries are members of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
However, AGRIS collects all content that discusses agriculture, science and technology from all over the world. The list of AGRIS subjects is available here
Currently, AGRIS has more than 8.4 million multilingual bibliographic records that cover books (31,000), conference papers (286,000), journal articles (5,000,000), thesis (62,000) and many others. We estimate that more than 1,3 million records provide links that provides access to the full text.
A selected content from AFRICA in AGRIS
In a recent study, AGRIS carried out a search on a number of topical themes relevant to FAO and available content from African countries. The selected themes were, ‘food security’, ’resilience to crises’, ‘land tenure’, ‘family farming’, 'indigenous knowledge’, ‘sustainable agriculture’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’.
These topics were searched on AGRIS for the individual African countries (For example, ‘food security’ AND Algeria, etc. or filtering the search results by African countries), in this way trying to establish at least in the identified topics which talk about Africa. The total results are listed below:-
| Topic | Total AGRIS Results | All Africa Results |
| Food Security | 616,812 | 58,939 |
| Resilience to crises | 7,133 | 2,179 |
| Land Tenure | 214,630 | 30,016 |
| Family Farming | 228,168 | 27,205 |
| Indigenous Knowledge | 99,118 | 15,308 |
| Sustainable Agriculture | 812,993 | 75,200 |
| Gender Mainstreaming | 21,802 | 5,447 |
Browsing AGRIS records by country
Why not browse AGRIS collections by African countries of your choice? Below we exemplify how to retrieve bibliographic data of instititions in Ghana.
- Go to AGRIS Search
- Choose Get Classical View
- Type in the subject of your choice. For example Cocoa
- Under Apply the following filters to your query
- Select Data Providers
- Choose Ghana (*all*)
- Click , Refine Search Button
- The results will be displayed on your left hand.
