On 22 May 2024, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) hosted a webinar to demonstrate to Research4Life and AGORA users how to improve article findability with controlled vocabulary. Nearly 200 participants from 80 countries attended the highly impactful webinar, which focused on FAO's valuable multilingual controlled vocabulary, AGROVOC, and was titled “Enhancing Article Findability in Agricultural Sciences with AGROVOC Thesaurus.”

The primary objective of the webinar was to provide participants with in-depth strategies for optimising the findability of data with controlled vocabularies. The webinar served as an invaluable opportunity for participants to gain a comprehensive understanding of controlled vocabularies and their significance in organising and retrieving information in agricultural sciences, learn about the hierarchical structure of AGROVOC, including concepts, preferred terms, and relationships, and understand how to leverage AGROVOC to improve the findability and visibility of articles in agricultural sciences.

A key highlight of the webinar was a live demonstration showcasing how to develop effective search strategies using AGROVOC and how to seamlessly integrate them into the research workflow.

The webinar recording is available here: https://youtu.be/IkXTWE4XvgA.

This initial webinar marked the beginning of a series. In each subsequent webinar of the "Enhancing Article Findability in Agricultural Sciences with AGROVOC Thesaurus" series, a different discipline within FAO’s areas of interest will be the focus, enabling the use of specific examples tailored to each session. This inaugural webinar centred on "forestry."  The next webinar will be announced soon. To receive more information about future webinars and other AGORA events, join the community here: https://dgroups.org/fao/agora. 

For more information, visit https://www.fao.org/agora/ or https://www.fao.org/agrovoc/.   

More about AGROVOC

AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary that covers concepts and terminology under FAO's areas of interest. It is a structured collection of concepts, terms, definitions and relationships. These concepts can represent anything related to food and agriculture, spanning from specific terms like "maize" to broader concepts like "hunger," "aquaculture," "value chains," or "forestry."  AGROVOC plays a crucial role in providing unambiguous identification of resources, standardising indexing processes, and enhancing the efficiency of search functions. Additionally, each concept in AGROVOC is associated with terms used to express it in multiple languages, known as lexicalisations. AGROVOC  has over 41,000 concepts and 994,000 terms available in up to 42 languages.

More about AGORA

Since 2003, FAO has led the AGORA collection, which provides access to thousands of journals, e-books, and other information resources covering agriculture, fisheries, food, nutrition, veterinary science and related biological, environmental and social sciences in public institutions worldwide.  The programme aims to improve the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research, education and training in low-income countries.

Subscription-based journals and major scientific books remain important sources of high-quality scientific information, crucial in advancing higher education, improving the ability to share findings, and informing public policy decisions. AGORA is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life.