USDA Research Now Easily Searchable by Public

February 16, 2015

In order to give citizens more access to research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Agricultural Library (NAL) has launched a new, public-facing search engine called PubAg. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service tells us about the tool in, “NAL Unveils New Search Engine for Published USDA Research.” It looks a lot like a Lucene/Solr system to us; that choice would not be at all surprising. The post tells us:

“PubAg, which can be found at PubAg.nal.usda.gov, is a new portal for literature searches and full-text access of more than 40,000 scientific journal articles by USDA researchers, mostly from 1997 to 2014. New articles by USDA researchers will be added almost daily, and older articles may be added if possible. There is no access fee for PubAg.

“Phase I of PubAg provides access for searches of 340,000 peer-reviewed agriculturally related scientific literature, mostly from 2002 to 2012, each entry offering a citation, abstract and a link to the article if available from the publisher. This initial group of highly relevant, high-quality literature was taken from the 4 million bibliographic citations in NAL’s database.”

The agency has worked to make the system easy to use for folks from farmers to academicians. So easy, in fact, that there’s no registration — no user name or password is needed. We’re told that NAL maintains “one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive compilations of agricultural information.” Now they’ve made that wealth of knowledge available to us all.

Cynthia Murrell, February 16, 2015

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