Database Guides

CAB Abstracts

CAB Abstracts contains summaries of journal articles, conference proceedings and other literature in the field of applied life sciences, nutrition, food science, human health, environmental science, agriculture and plant sciences, as well as tourism, leisure and the hospitality industries.

Coverage begins in 1973.


Finding Journal Articles

Start by thinking about what you want to search for and coming up with some keywords and phrases to describe it.

Enter these in the boxes provided and click on Search.

You can use various search techniques to add in extra terms, narrow results down and get more useful results:

  • phrase searching i.e. including the terms in quotation marks to ensure they appear together rather than being split up and
  • boolean search
    • AND – narrows down the results. All connected terms must be included in the results
    • OR – broadens out the results. Either connected term can be included in the results
    • NOT – narrows down the results. The second term must be excluded from the results

If you would like to look for a phrase make sure to include it in "quotation marks" as this will ensure the terms appear together rather than being split up. For example:

   Top Tip!

If your search results are disappointing, try to think of different ways of expressing your topic (e.g. for outcomes try achievements or results).

If you add the wildcard symbol * to the root of a word you can find all words beginning with the letters in front of it (e.g. outcome* would find outcome and outcomes at the same time). Instead of "school breakfasts" you could try "school breakfast*". Alternatively you could try breakfast* on one line and school* on another, in case an article talks about the provision of breakfasts in schools rather than the phrase "school breakfast*".

Click on the title of a particularly relevant article to view the summary and see what subject terms have been used to describe that article. You can then search on those terms.

To find out more about planning a search, creating search strategies and using different search techniques, explore our search techniques guide.



Getting the Full Text

Click on the title of any article to see more details and a summary.

You can add details of an article to a Folder by clicking on the relevant icon. You can then email the details of all articles added to your folder to yourself or transfer them to RefWorks.

Full Text at RGU

CAB Abstracts does not contain full-text articles (although very occasionally the full-text of articles from some of our other EBSCOhost databases may be pulled through to CAB Abstracts).

However, we may have it on a different service. Click on Full Text @ RGU / Check LibrarySearch for full text options to check.

If we have the full text article as part of another subscription, then you will be redirected to it. If we do not have the article, you will be told Full Text Not Available.

You may still be able to get the article, by requesting an Inter-Library Loan (ILLs). Remember to sign in to LibrarySearch to see this option. You can find out more about ILLs on our inter-library loans page.