Agriculture-related concepts in non-agricultural and general thesauri

Abstract

We identified general indexing concepts, based on descriptors (preferred-terms) which contain terms 'agriculture' and 'agricultural', in several non-agricultural and general information systems/databases, and respective thesauri (controlled vocabularies), covering fields of civil, mechanical, chemical engineering, physics, psychology, medicine, biomedicine, education, business, economics, finance, library science, sociology, social and political sciences and related disciplines (for example, CSA-Illumina ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), LISA (Library and Information Science Abstracts), Sociological Abstracts (Sociological Indexing Terms), Ebsco Academic Search Complete (Subject Terms), Medline (MeSH), Political Science Complete, Ei Engineering Village Compendex and Inspec, PsycINFO (Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms), ABI/Inform Global (ProQuest Thesaurus). We compared characteristics, strengths and limitations of thesauri in each respective system with regard to searching (word-, phrase-indexing, truncation (wildcard), stemming, autostemming, hierarchical structure (tree-structures) and relations among preferred-, non-preferred terms, Narrower, Broader and Related Terms. We assessed database coverage of general agriculture-related topics based on retrieval with these terms. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.