Library: Agriculture: Getting Started

Preliminary Research Strategies

Use Encyclopedias to Gather Leads

such as terms, concepts, names, and more.

Britannica Academic
High quality encyclopedia articles, videos, audios, related Web links, magazines, newspapers, an atlas, statistics, & biographical information.
Science Reference Source
Full-text science encyclopedias, reference books, articles, and images.

Wikipedia

Skim Books' Tables-of-Contents & Indexes

The National Academies Press

Glance Through News & Magazine Articles

Browse Websites or Blog Posts

Read Titles & Abstracts from Journals

Academic Search Complete (EBSCO)
Google Scholar
If you can't find a free version of an article, ask a librarian to help you get it.
JSTOR
MEDLINE
Science Direct

General Encyclopedias

Britannica Academic
High quality encyclopedia articles, videos, audios, related Web links, magazines, newspapers, an atlas, statistics, & biographical information.

Wikipedia
Use this to find background information, keywords, links, and other leads.

Selected Hawaii & Tropical Plant Resources

Plants of Hawaii
Information on every flowering plant species documented in Hawai‘i, including detailed descriptions of each taxon, multi-access ID keys, herbarium specimen data and images, and thousands of field images.

Hawaiian Native Plant Propagation Database
Information from the UH College of Tropical Agriculture on propagation techniques of many indigenous and endemic plants. Search or browse by scientific or common names.
Plant Propagation Protocols: Pacific Islands
From the USDA Forest Service and Southern Regional Extension Forestry.
Useful Tropical Plants Database
Provides referenced information on the edible, medicinal, and other uses of plants that can be grown in tropical regions. Search by plant name or criteria such as growth habit, soil type, pH, etc.

The Importance of Plants Names for Research

Names are crucial to finding information about plants. Each kind of plant may have many names:

a scientific name, comprised of the genus and species name, and
one or more common names (here, that can include Hawaiian & English names).

To further complicate things, a name may have been spelled differently at different times, or have been changed.

(For a good discussion on the topic, check out this Plant Names page.)

There's one more name to know: the family name.

As you do your research, list all the names that refer to the plant that you find, plus its family, and variant spellings.

Why? Because when searching for information on a plant, if you don't search on all of its names, you might miss finding everything you could.

Some books, databases, and other resources you might consult may be organized by family, or by genus. They may have an index listing scientific names, and another index with common names, or an index that lists all of them together.

Sometimes, you may not find information about your particular species in an information resource, but you might find information about its genus. This can still be useful because all plants in a given genus share common characteristics.

When searching for your plant in a database on the Web, try these tips:

Put quotation marks around the scientific name - this ensures you find items with both names together in exact order.

To ensure you find all the items about your plant, regardless of which name is used, string all the names together with an OR in between each, like this:

"Ranunculus hawaiensis" OR makou OR "awa kanaloa" OR buttercup