Databases

In addition to Academic Search Premier and Web of Science, here are a few more useful databases to find scholarly articles:

• Agricola (Ebsco)
  • Over 4.8 million citations to journal articles, monographs, theses, patents, software, audio-visual materials, and technical reports. Covers agriculture, plant and animal sciences, forestry, entomology, soil and water resources, and food and nutrition.
• CAB Direct
  • Subjects covered include animal science; crop protection; plant science; parasitology; human and animal nutrition; natural resources and ecology; forestry, forest products and agroforesty; soil science; rural development, tourism and economics; food science and food products; biotechnology; and agricultural engineering. Some full-text content is available on the CABDirect platform.
• AGRIS
  • This database contains bibliographic records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library, primarily covering the subjects of agriculture, plant and animal sciences, forestry, entomology, soil and water resources, and food and nutrition.
• Google Scholar
  • Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts, technical reports, etc.

Websites

Below is a list of websites that are helpful for this assignment.

• Public Policy Resources
  • Govtrack.us
  • Official Idaho Website
  • State of Idaho Legislature
  • U.S. House of Representatives
  • U. S. Senate
  • The White House
• Other Resources
  • Congress.gov
    • Information on actions of the United States Congress and news about federal advocacy and activism.
  • FAO
    • Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
  • FAO INFOODS
    • INFOODS is the International Network of Food Data Systems. Provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
  • U.S. FDA
    • U.S. Food and Drug Administration - United States Department of Health and Human Services
  • USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
    • Contains statistics collected through the national Census of Agriculture and other programs that details the nation’s farm and production data.

Print Books

If you are on campus, you can use stack browsing as a viable search strategy to find print books on a topic. That is to visit the library and locate the physical bookshelves to browse the book collections with a particular subject focus area using Library of Congress Call Numbers. For example, if you are interested in food crops, you would want to look for call numbers that start with SB175-177. Other relevant call numbers include:

TP368-456	Food processing and manufacture
TX341-641	Nutrition. Foods and food supply
S560-571.5	Farm economics; Farm management

Government Documents

When searching the library catalog, you can filter the results by Government Documents under Resource Type. These documents are located on the library basement. You can click this link or email Rami Attebury to learn more about how to access government documents.

You can use Google to search for government documents as well. Add site:gov at the end of your keyword search terms will yield results from government webpages. For instance, if you are looking for regulations of the sugar changed to meet demand or changes in the industry, you can search for sugar AND regulation* site:gov. Note that the quality and objectivity of the information on .gov sites can vary widely.

Citation

Remember to cite your sources and format them according to the MLA style.

You may also consider using a citation manager (if you have never used one before) to cite your sources. A citation manager can be a time saver, and is incredibly useful if you are thinking about pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree in which considerable writing is expected. Check out the recording of library workshop on Citation Management with Zotero below if interested.