AGRIS is the 'International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology'. Together with CARIS, Current Agricultural Research Information System, AGRIS is maintained, promoted and disseminated all over the world by means of a network of scientific documentation centres.

The scope of the AGRIS/CARIS network is to make available all kinds of relevant agricultural research information, giving particular emphasis to information sources that are not easily accessible through other services (widely known as non-conventional or "grey" literature, e.g. theses, reports, etc.). The network is part of the national agricultural information services of the participating countries; FAO's role is to assist its member countries to reach the goal of self sufficiency in information management and to ensure information exchange between national and regional systems.

In 1975 the AGRIS network began publishing a bibliographic database which now holds more than 3 million records. This CD contains a subset of the AGRIS database; the complete AGRIS database can be found on the Internet at http://www.fao.org/agris. The latest version of the multilingual agricultural thesaurus, AGROVOC, is now accessible on the Internet at http://www.fao.org/agrovoc; in addition, details on 30 000 agricultural research projects and their current status as reported by the CARIS participating centres can be consulted at http://www.fao.org/agris, and are available on CD-ROM).