Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

MEL’s Database of the Week for 12/3/10

December 3rd, 2010

Welcome to Database of the Week — a feature from the Management & Economics Library (MEL).  These weekly database snapshots will give you basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources.

This Week’s Featured Database: CAB, from CAB International.

Link: www.lib.purdue.edu/mel, in the pull down Quick Access to Business Databases alpha list right below the Libraries’ search box.

Description/focus: CAB, including CAB Abstracts, delivers bibliographic information for agriculture, the environment, food and nutrition, leisure and tourism, animal and veterinary sciences, human health, microbiology, and plant sciences.

Start with this hint: The CAB interface is OvidSP from Wolters Kluwer, so you will be familiar with it if you research in AGRICOLA, PsychInfo, ERIC, or other Ovid databases.  Enter a term in the search field and hit Search.  It would probably be more efficient to limit your term to the title, abstract, or one of the other Search Fields.  Try separate searches for environment, Africa, and water, then combine them with a check in the boxes on the left and click And.  The 559 hits are displayed in date order but you can change that with the Sort by filter on the left of the list. Full text articles are labeled CAB Database PDFs; there are not many, so become friends with the Find it @ Purdue Libraries icon. Many of the papers are from journals not available here but can be easily obtained through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).

Why you should know this database: The Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International (CABI), the producer of CAB and CAB Abstracts, has been providing scientific expertise and information for 100 years and is working to improve people’s lives in more than 70 countries.  They currently have openings for positions in Africa and the U.K.

How this database can be integrated into the curriculum: Students who are studying in fields as diverse as food safety and biodiversity can search in CAB for international research.

Other common tools available in this database: some fulltext; save selected hits online for later retrieval; citation help; suggestions for similar articles; filters for type of document (article, book, thesis, etc.); email selected hits to yourself; RSS feed; limit by date; option to sort by date or relevance.  For use of these tools in this database, contact Mary Dugan

Cost: Paid annually by Purdue University Libraries.

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Database of the Week comes to you from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). Our intent is to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know.  If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact kranlib@purdue.edu.  Database of the Week is archived  at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/MGMT/.  For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).

If you would like us to promote your favorite database, send an email to mdugan@purdue.edu.