Frequently Asked Questions

Compiled by the National Agricultural Library of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and published on the Web by Community of Science, AGRICOLA (Agricultural Online Access) is the most comprehensive source of U.S. agricultural and life sciences information.

AGRICOLA serves as the document locator and bibliographic control system for the National Agricultural Library (NAL) collection. It contains over 3.3 million bibliographic records of journal articles, monographs, theses, patents, software, audio-visual materials, and technical reports related to agriculture from 1979 to the present. Indexers regularly scan over 1,400 journals for input into the database. Since 1984, the database also has included some records produced by cooperating institutions for documents not held by the NAL. Data is provided to Community of Science under contract with the National Technical Information Service.

AGRICOLA provides comprehensive coverage of newly acquired worldwide publications in agriculture and related fields, covering the field of agriculture in the broadest sense. Records are catalogued using the controlled vocabulary of Library of Congress Subject Headings and, since 1985, of the CAB Thesaurus.

AGRICOLA through COS enables you to:

• Select a search interface designed for your level of search experience.
• Search for abstracts in specific journals.
• Download search results in citation formats for use with most citation management software packages.
• Track your queries so that you can repeat past searches against current data.
• Search by MARC record field.

A database search produces a customized bibliography. Within seconds, the system provides a table of references found on a given topic. You can then specify which references you want to see.