FAO Home

AAM - Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What is the AGRIMetaMaker?
    The AGRIMetamaker is a web form that allows to enter, review, save and submit bibliographic references to the AGRIS Secretariat.
  2. What are the objectives of the AGRIMetaMaker?
    You can easily create metadata in a few easy steps and you can save these references in your computer, for your future re-use and to be submitted to AGRIS for their indexing.
  3. I am a publisher of a journal and I am writing to express our interest to include the metadata and full-text of the articles published in my journal to the AGRIS database. What should I do?
    If the citations of your journal is either already indexed in some Serivce Providers systems, such as DOAJ or Scielo, or are already available in an XML format, you need to contact agris@fao.org.
  4. Is AGRIS accepting citations of articles written in any language?
    Yes. It is anyway advisable to provide English translations for titles and abstracts, if any.
  5. Can I submit the PDF articles to AGRIS?
    No, AGRIS is not a repository of PDF documents. AGRIS is a bibliographic database that index agricultural (and fisheries, forestry, etc.) related references.
  6. When adding content, do I transliterate the text written in my language, to enable reconstruction of the English spelling in the original language?
    No, this is not recommended. AGRIMetaMaker is a full UTF-8 compliant form. You should use your local character set, which will be maintained both in the Data Entry display and in the export. However, for retrieval purposes, it is recommended to translate this text in the English language.
  7. I have problems with the accented characters in the AGROVOC Browse.
    To use AAM, your browser should be set to the UTF-8 character encoding. We tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and  Google Chrome and all these browsers allow to easily change this setting. In Firefox, for example, from the Main Menu, select the View item, then Character Encoding and then choose "Unicode (UTF-8)".
  8. My metadata does not include keywords. How do I?
    AGRIS data providers normally index the bibliographic references using AGROVOC, one of the most used thesauri in the area of agriculture. AGROVOC offers several web services that will allow you to describe easily the resource. The AGRIMetaMaker offers an on-line automatic AGROVOC indexing tool, which allows you to browse and select the required terms to your articles. Should you not find the term in the list of terms, please send a request to agris@fao.org.
  9. Can I submit metadata to AGRIS with no link to the full text?
    Yes, it is possible. However, AGRIS recommends the inclusion of any information that may be useful when researchers and students search and retrieve information from the AGRIS Portal. And this is surely one of the most important.
  10. Can I modify the data I entered?
    1.       Log in http://agris.fao.org with your credentials
    2.       Click on AgriMetaMaker in the left frame
    3.       Click in the Edit Data link on the right frame, below the AgriMetamaker label
    4.       In the metamaker_export screen, select AGRIMetaMaker – Data entry and click “Apply”.
               You will get all the records you have entered
    5.       Click on the relevant record and click the “Edit” tab
    6.       Go to the part of the record that needs editing and, once done, “Save” the data
  11. Who are the users of the AGRIS portal?
    Scientists, researchers, students, whoever is interested in broadening their knowledge on specific AGRIS related areas.
  12. What is a bibliographic reference or citation?
    A reference or “bibliographic reference” or citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other bibliographic resource. In the context of the AGRIS metadata, its content is including some mandatory tags, such as a title, keywords, date and language.