Enhancing Agricultural Research with FAO’s AGRIS and AGROVOC: A conversation with Elizabeth Arnaud

Since 2017, Elizabeth has led the CGIAR Ontology Community of Practice and chaired the CGIAR Task Group for AGROVOC, strengthening CGIAR’s contribution to these programs and supporting the consolidation of the semantic landscape for labeling data in agriculture and food systems.

The importance of AGRIS for global agricultural research

Q: Do you think it is crucial for agricultural research institutions and networks – such as CGIAR – to have access to a large bibliographic database like AGRIS? What are the benefits?

Elizabeth Arnaud: Established almost 50 years ago, AGRIS is a crucial FAO resource with over 13 million records on various publications. Enabling knowledge discovery, it is free and open access, greatly benefiting the agricultural and food systems community. It helps researchers delve into existing knowledge, understand prior research, and identify key players in their field. Moreover, AGRIS offers content in over 100 languages, making it accessible to non-English-speaking communities. This multilingual capability is a significant advantage, especially for CGIAR, which primarily publishes in English. Additionally, the AGRIS team organizes webinars to train users on publishing and retrieving data, thus strengthening the community and maintaining connections with more than 700 data providers.

By indexing our research outputs in AGRIS, CGIAR extends its work to a broader audience and addresses knowledge gaps in areas where CGIAR excels, such as food systems for sustainable development and climate change. Furthermore, some of our research partners lack the means to publish their data. By collaborating on research projects, CGIAR can mediate and make this data accessible through AGRIS, sharing our collective research results.