AGRIS is the international information system for the agricultural sciences and technology. Since 1975, when the system became operational, AGRIS has accumulated a database of more than 2.7 million references.                        AGRIS DATABASE

What subjects does AGRIS cover ?

 
Created by FAO to facilitate information exchange, AGRIS identifies world literature dealing with all aspects of agriculture: plant and animal production and protection; post harvest processing of primary agricultural products; forestry; fisheries; agricultural engineering; natural resources and the environment as related to agriculture; food; human nutrition; agricultural economics; rural development; agricultural administration, legislation, information, education and extension.
 

How does AGRIS work?

 

AGRIS is a cooperative system in which participating countries input references to the literature produced within their boundaries and, in return, draw on the information provided by the other participants.

 

AGRIS collects bibliographic references to materials which may be either conventional (journal articles, books) or non-conventional (sometimes called "grey literature"), e.g. theses, reports, etc., not available through normal commercial channels.

 

To date 159 national and 31 international and intergovernmental centres participate and submit about 14.000 items per month.

Read about the new developments under discussion for the AGRIS system

 

AGRIS and multilingual indexing

 
To make the system available to non-English speaking users, FAO and the European Community (EC) developed in the early 1980s a multilingual agricultural vocabulary, AGROVOC.

 

The AGROVOC Thesaurus has been used by AGRIS for indexing and retrieval since 1986. The Third edition of AGROVOC was published in 1995, with the first supplement. Supplements to AGROVOC are produced yearly. The present version is Edition 3,1998.   AGROVOC is is available from FAO's - Sales & Marketing Group, Information Division (GI) Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy. The purchase price is US$100,00.-; a special discount is available for orders from UN agencies and developing countries. Other language editions, such as Czech, German, Italian and Portuguese are maintained in the respective national AGRIS centres.

Updates available

The following products are now available through the AGRIS Processing unit's FTP server at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna:

• Current monthly AGRIS output file
• latest version of AGROVOC/Edition 3,version 1998
• most recent training materials

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