This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.
We count on food and agricultural research to solve a wide variety of problems. USDA’s research programs contribute to improvements to crop and livestock production, natural resource conservation, human nutrition, food safety, and many other topics. Our science agencies carry out USDA’s research mission across different geographical regions, covering a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines and topics important to American agriculture and consumers in general.
Federal RePORTER is a new online tool that facilitates explorate of this breadth of USDA research. It allows users to search and download details about thousands of active and recent research projects conducted at the Agricultural Research Service or the U.S. Forest Service, as well as university projects funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. With this tool, users can also generate summary information on research projects, map research project locations, identify projects most similar to those identified by search results, and create groups of related projects using interactive visualizations.
Federal RePORTER was developed in collaboration with other Federal agencies as part of the STAR METRICS® consortium, so it also identifies connections from USDA science to nutrition research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), bioinformatics at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and remote sensing at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), for example. This provides a powerful, unprecedented way to search across all Federal science investments.
Two other new tools also rely on greater transparency and access to data to showcase different aspects of USDA science. USDA/VIVO provides profiles of the people involved in USDA-supported research projects, with links to their latest scientific publications. PatentsView identifies patents that result from USDA research, as well as USDA-supported projects, and provides detailed information including technology classification, inventor location, and current patent rights ownership.
Together, Federal RePORTER, USDA/VIVO, and PatentsView provide new capabilities for understanding the scope of USDA scientific research and will help USDA and other Federal agencies pursue efficient and effective solutions to research problems. These tools also put this information in the hands of potential users and collaborators. By providing free and public access to this information, we hope users will familiarize themselves with USDA science and learn about the array of active scientific research projects underway at USDA. Maybe access to information using these new tools will help generate the next scientific discovery, new technology, or commercial breakthrough!
