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Table 2 Selected databases, platforms, and search engines for searches in English language

From: What are the socio-economic impacts of genetically modified crops worldwide? A systematic map protocol

General scientific databases and platforms

Web of Science (WoS) (Thomson Reuters) (includes Web of Science Core Collection, BIOSIS Citation Index, BIOSIS Previews, Current Contents Connect, Derwent Innovations Index, Inspec, MEDLINE, and SciELO Citation Index)

Scopus (Elsevier)(a)

On-line search engine

Google Scholar (GS)(b)

Organizations with focus on developing countries

British Library for Development Studies (includes African and Indian journals)

ELDIS (information service related with international development issues)

International organizations

AGRIS (maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO)

IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute)

JOLIS (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, IMF & International Finance Corporation, IFC)

OECD iLibrary (Organization for Economic Co-operation)

Other organizations/institutional repositories

AGRICOLA (US National Agricultural Library)

 

IDEAS/ REPEC (Largest bibliographic database dedicated to economics freely available. It contains bibliographic information from other open source databases such as AgEcon)

 

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)(c)

Grey literature

Open Grey (system for information on grey literature in Europe)

  1. (a)Scopus is a multidisciplinary database, which along with WoS, is considered the most complete and widely used for scientific information identification and retrieval [52].
  2. (b)Google scholar retrieves peer-review and non peer-review publications (grey literature). According to Gehanno et al. [53], one of the advantages of using Google scholar is that it identifies more types of literature compared to a general scientific database. The results of a study conducted by the same authors suggest that the current coverage of Google scholar allows retrieving all the high quality studies identified by other general scientific databases such as WoS, and “could be the first choice for systematic reviews or meta-analysis” [53]. On the negative side, Google scholar is “constantly-changing content, algorithms and database structure” and Google does not provide details about Google scholar’s database coverage [54]. The results of the searches will be ordered by relevance and the first 1000 documents will be imported to Citavi. The reason for this is that Google scholar limits the retrieval of search results to 1000 documents for any particular search query.
  3. (c)BASE is one of the largest institutional repository search engines [55], which allows access to 2762 content sources, such as the National Library of Australia, Institutional Repository of PhD theses from Katholieke Univ. Leuven (Belgium), EMBRAPA (Brazil), University of Saskatchewan (Canada), Peking University Institutional Repository (China), among others. The full list of sources is available at:
  4. http://www.base-search.net/about/en/about_sources_date_dn.php?menu=2.
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Environmental Evidence

ISSN: 2047-2382