CAB Abstracts on CAB Direct, EBSCOHost, and Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge: Comparing the Platforms and Their Searching and Retrieval Capabilities

This comparative review of CAB Abstracts on the CAB Direct, EBSCOHost and Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge platforms focuses on the similarities and differences in the way they are accessed, their interfaces, and their search and retrieval capabilities. Evaluating the platforms highlights how well they provide for the different levels of users, the ease in navigation and use, flexibility in display and output formats, availability of useful Help, update frequency, and added features for discoverability and alerting. Examining the search and retrieval capabilities of each product reveals the variety of searching modes, ease of use for all levels of expertise, the availability of browseable indexes, thesaurus capabilities, limit features, wildcard and Boolean connectors, field searching, proximity operators, and search history usability. Examples using standardized searches from the databases highlight the recall and precision of search results.