By Kim Kaplan
The National Agricultural Library (NAL) has unveiled PubAg, a user-friendly search engine that gives the public enhanced access to research published by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists. NAL is part of USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
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.
Phase II of PubAg, planned for later in 2015, will include the remainder of NAL's significant bibliographic records.
PubAg has been specifically designed to be easy to use and to serve a number of diverse users including the public, farmers, scientists, academicians and students. There is no requirement for a username, password or any other form of registration to use PubAg.
NAL has one of the world's largest and most comprehensive compilations of agricultural information available.
Source:USDA