Medicinal and Aromatic Plants in Scientific Databases

Abstract

This chapter provides assessment of uses and retrieval of terms related to medicinal and aromatic plants in databases available on different platforms/interfaces: ABI/Inform Global (ProQuest; business, management, finance, trade, markets), Agricola (NAL, American National Agricultural Library), Agris-Agrovoc (FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), CAB Abstracts/OVID (CABI, CAB International; agriculture), Compendex (Ei/Engineering Index, Elsevier; engineering, technical sciences), FSTA (IFIS, International Food Information System; food/drink sciences, technology, human nutrition), Medline/Ebsco-MeSH (NLM, American National Library of Medicine; health, medical sciences (biomedicine), veterinary medicine), Scopus/SciVerse (Elsevier; citation database), Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest; social sciences, e.g. human-environment interactions, rural sociology, ethnology), Web of Science/Web of Knowledge (Thomson Reuters; citation database). Database features and functionalities are reviewed. The applicable terms (used for indexing, controlled glossaries, descriptors, subjects headings, keywords) are located in respective thesauri, e.g.: drug crops, drug plants, essential oil crops, essential oil plants, herbal drugs, herbal medicine, medicinal plants, phytotherapy, “plants, medicinal”. Several additional terms and non-descriptors are identified, e.g. aromatic plants, herbaceous agents, herbal remedies, ethnobotany, herbal products, herbal preparations, plant drugs, herbal therapies. Search utilities, principles and rules are tested, e.g. search syntax (query), operators (Boolean, proximity, context), field codes, truncation (wildcard), phrase search, stemming (lemmatization). Bibliometric (scientometric) analysis is conducted in selective databases in order to tentatively assess the numbers and growth of potentially relevant records.