WHY IS THE FSTA® THESAURUS IMPORTANT?

FSTA is a specific database with its own proprietary thesaurus and indexing for food and nutrition research. This is important because it is quality that you want, not numbers. Searching through 80 million entries that are irrelevant is going to waste time.

Every abstract in our database is carefully indexed against the world’s most comprehensive subject-specific food and beverage thesaurus, unique to FSTA®. This has 16,000 terms.

This means that searches are hyper-efficient and Narrow Terms (NTs) allow researchers to get exactly the right results.

Take a search for “spirits”.

When you do this, you want to be able to Narrow the Terms (NTs) and for that you need hierarchies​. The more Narrow Terms (NTs) you have, the more specific you can be and therefore the more relevant the results.

When you search popular databases the NTs vary greatly.

FSTA – ‘Spirits’, with 37 narrower terms (NTs)​ has a much better way of classifying the information than other databases.

When you want to discover specific, relevant and factual information, the thesaurus and indexing allows you to to that fast. It is all about being efficient and ensuring that you get the full picture. 

Find out why indexing matters when doing food science research.

This thesaurus has been built since 1969. That’s more than 50 years of expertise being applied to the data. There is simply no other database that has a unique food science thesaurus this accurate. So whether it's an American spelling or a British spelling, whether there are two names for the same food item, whether there's a hyphen or not...FSTA has it covered.

(The thesaurus also underpins our keyword research tool for scientists)

When you want to get the right information that is specific and relevant, that's when you want FSTA.