AGORA: What’s in a name?
AGORA is about agriculture, but only in the broadest sense
“Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture” might appear to have a strongly agricultural slant, but AGORA’s topical reach extends far beyond that. Did you know, for example, that there are 7,701 resources related to “food safety in the hospitality industry?” Or, 1,429 journals in AGORA on economics and social science?
In fact AGORA covers the full spectrum of the biological, environmental and social sciences. Its peer-reviewed publications cut through 22 subjects that run from agriculture through to soil science, with anything from nutrition to economics and forestry in between (see photo, above.)
A good way of seeing how many different topics are available on AGORA is to browse by subject. If you are new to AGORA, do this by clicking on your desired subject from the dropdown menu to see how many journals are available on that theme. Then run a search through Summon to bring up a much larger set of results that includes journal articles, papers and many more content types containing your search terms.
For example, if “nutrition” is your area of interest, you’ll be presented with over 1 million results through a Summon search. Within “nutrition” AGORA suggests scores of related “subject terms” and you can then use these to further narrow down your search. “Food safety,” for example, yields close to 470,00 results. From “food safety,” you get to “food safety in the hospitality industry”, which returns a further 7,701 results.
To this end, by ticking or excluding the “subject terms” that interest you, a topic as seemingly ‘niche’ as “Industrial chemistry and manufactured technologies” (in relation to food safety in hospitality) returns 488 results.
