Searches in Onesearch, databases and thematic sites

 

Cab Abstracts is one of CABI digital library products, curated by CABI Publishing. It's a database specialised in agriculture, environmental sciences and life sciences. You can get access via OneSearch, clicking on the tab "databases" and typing "CAB".

You can also find a Tutorial&support page (https://help.cabi.org/cabi-digital-library-help/)

Let's see how we can launch a search on CAb Abstracts (please note that the interface has slightly changed, due to a update, but filters and functions are still the same)

 

 

As a Unifi user you will be able to view the contents of CAB Direct through the “Data banks” tab in the One Search home. By typing "CAB" in the search form, you can click on the link "Cab Abstract plus full text" which will direct you to the database.

As you can see, the home page is similare to that of other databases and to carry out your research, all you have to do is to use the techniques that you have learned about in this course.

 

·         CABI still offers a series of short and simple tutorials: https://www.cabdirect.org/help/training-videos.html

·         You can also use the Quick Guide on the home page or the online help (https://www.cabdirect.org/help/index.html).

We recommend that you create a profile within CAB Direct, so that you can use all the functions for storing results and search strategies, which at the beginning of a new session will avoid having to repeat the operations already carried out.

From here you can create the profile:

The results of your search can also be exported and organized with specific software, called Reference Management Systems (RMS), which we will see later (EndNote; Zotero).

But now, let's take action!

Below you will find an example of research for practice or as a template for your future searches.

·         Let's imagine we want to carry out research on "consociazione del mais" and want to know the scientific production of the last 5 years regarding this topic.

·         Remember: first of all, it will be important to choose your keywords carefully and launch the search in English.

·         To respect these two criteria it will be useful to write the scientific name of the plant (Zea mays) and to use the Agrovoc Thesaurus to get the correct translation of "consociazione".

·         You will then insert the keywords Zea mays and intercropping in the search mask, taking care to use truncation characters and Boolean operators:

 

You will get a list of results that you can filter by year and other criteria, through the facets in the column on the right. You already know many of these facets, but CABI offers some that are unusual or specific to your field of study.

For example, we would like to draw your attention to “Organism Descriptors”, which allows you to filter the results based on the scientific names of organisms (plants or animals); or on "Geographic location", which allows you to select resources based on the place where the searches were conducted (not to be confused with the place of publication of the text). "Topics" corresponds to what other Databases call "keywords" and can show you the concepts related to your search results.

Here is the complete list of facets and their functions, taken directly from CAB Direct:

Topics: includes the Descriptor and Identifier record fields

Organism Descriptors: plant and animal scientific names from the CAB Thesaurus.

 

Broader terms: terms which exist above your search term in the CAB Thesaurus taxonomic and geographic hierarchy, e.g. a search for Coleoptera shows Insects as a Broader term. 

Document type: category of publication, for example, journal, conference proceeding etc.

Year: year of publication.

Source title: title of publication.

Author: includes Personal Authors, Author Variants, Editors, Additional Authors and Corporate Authors.

Geographic Location: location of the research, not where it is published. Terms included in CAB Thesaurus.

Language: language (s) of Summary and Language (s) of Text.

Your Products: the CABI products that your institution has subscribed to, e.g. Global Health.

CABI Hosted Full Text: publications which are hosted but not published by CABI, e.g conference proceedings, smaller publishers' journals etc. These are typically referred to as 'gray' literature.

Evidence Based Research: designed to retrieve systematic review and meta-analyzes by searching for elements in a publication's title and abstract.

Open Access Journals: retrieves articles published in 'gold open access' journals, which are free to download and use. Currently CAB Direct only retrieves data published from 2015 onwards.

With the facets you can limit the number of results and move on to their analysis.

·  Remember that to read the text of the article you can click on   to access the text via Cab platform, or on or, if these are not present, on "find @ unifi" 

Can't you view the article even in this way? It means that CAB Direct notifies you of the existence of that resource, but does not give you direct access to the text. No fear:

-  Try launching a search on Onesearch: maybe you can find it on other platforms to which the University gives access; 

- If you cannot find it in this way either, send us a request for a document delivery (see Module 3) via Onesearch, filling in the form all the relevant fields (title, author, journal etc...) obtained from Cab.