In September, AGRIS reached the 7 million records, enriching its collection with the important agricultural literature of AGRICOLA, the database created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and maintained by the U.S. National Agricultural Library. 

In addition to the 3.3 million records indexed from AGRICOLA’s collection, AGRIS published 6,000 bibliographic references delivered by a number of scientific journal publishers, information centres and National libraries of Countries such as Albania, Bulgaria, Brazil, China, Cuba, Czech Rep., India, Latvia, Pakistan, Nepal (ICIMOD), Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovenia, Syria and Turkey.

Every month the AGRIS database, in collaboration with its active Network, a worldwide community of 150 and more Institutions, disseminates important information on agriculture and related sciences. Its repository grows day by day and today, its current 7 million scientific articles bibliographic references - all indexed by Google Scholar - play an essential role for the acquisition of always updated information from scientists, researchers and PhD, in the FAO technical areas.

When scientists access this information, they indirectly contribute to fulfil the first FAO strategic objective, that is to “help eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition”. This is explained by the fact that, in the last five years, the scientific world has recognized the importance of open access and scholarly data and the AGRIS Open repository has leveraged this message, thus facilitating the researchers to “…use each other’s data and conclusions to extend their own ideas, making the total effort much greater than the sum of the individual efforts”.[1]

To know more on AGRIS and browse its data, visit http://agris.fao.org, one of the most visited websites in FAO.

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[1] From “Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age”