The Usability of CAB Abstracts on Three Platforms

This comparative review of the CAB databases on CAB Direct, EBSCOhost, and Clarivate Web of Science platforms provides an update since 2011 on their similarities and differences based primarily on searching and retrieval capabilities and how well they are providing to different levels of users. The review of search and retrieval capabilities focuses on the variety of searching modes, ease of use, the availability of help, indexes, thesaurus, Boolean connectors, the ability to limit and refine features, and field searching capability. Examples are provided from each of the platforms to highlight recall and precision in search retrieval.