Topics Covered
SIRIC's main interest is to collect documents reflecting the direct relationship between the soybean plant and injurious, herbivorous arthropods or vectors of diseases, as well as beneficial pollinators and biological control agents of the pests. SIRIC also collects literature on pesticide interactions with soybeans, on soybean (usually oil) as an agent or emulsifier used in the chemical control of insects, and on soybean (usually meal) used in diets for rearing insects.

In addition to this core of documents on the soybean-arthropod association, up through 1990, SIRIC also collected literature on 24 species of major arthropod pests, regardless of the plant host discussed in the papers. View the List of Species This portion of the database, including papers that do not discuss soy as the host plant, is no longer being updated.

Many of the papers in the database discuss pest control tactics, including: Integrated pest management; Plant resistance; Cultural control tactics; Biological control tactics; and Chemical control tactics.

Scope of Coverage
SIRIC collects monographs, journal articles, scientific papers, reports, conference proceedings, extension publications, theses, and dissertations. SIRIC holds many documents containing unique records or experimental results, trip reports, and unpublished documents. Documents are identified from commercial indexes, by attending conferences, by reviewing publications and their lists of references, and through information networks of specialists. SIRIC includes analytical entries for book chapters and conference reports and has made an effort to collect sources back to the late 18th century for the soybean-arthropod literature.

Thesaurus
The topics covered by the database are organized into a carefully designed Thesaurus of over 8,000 subject terms and species names, which will make it easy for users to locate the information they need by searching with these terms. The Thesaurus is also hierarchical, which allows a search on a higher-level subject to also retrieve records that are assigned the related lower-level or more specific subjects. The terms cover five major topical areas: Arthropod species; Plant hosts; Control tactics; Entomological subjects; and Geographic areas.

Indexing
Each paper in the database is reviewed by staff members with backgrounds in entomology. Subject headings from the Thesaurus that best represent the content of the paper are selected and added to the database record for the paper, to allow for enhanced searching of the database.

History and Current Status
The SIRIC database was computerized in 1972, making it one of the first agricultural databases to enter the computer age. However, SIRIC was closed in 1990. Beginning in 1996, with support from the Illinois Soybean Checkoff Board, the SIRIC staff has been working to transport the database to a new computer platform, to update the database content with new records, and to make the database publicly available for the first time through this Web site. As new records are added and new searching capabilities are designed, they will be described on the What's New page.

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