Allison 2006

Appraisal of: "Allison MM. Comparison of CINAHL(Registered) via EBSCOhost(Registered), Ovid(Registered), and ProQuest(Registered). Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries. 2006;3(1):31-50."

Reviewer(s):

Su Golder
Ingvild Kirkehei

Full Reference:

Allison MM. Comparison of CINAHL(Registered) via EBSCOhost(Registered), Ovid(Registered), and ProQuest(Registered). Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries. 2006;3(1):31-50.

Short description:

This paper investigates the differences in three search interfaces – EBSCO, Ovid and ProQuest for searching CINAHL database. The interfaces were explored for unique search features and records display. In addition, five basic searches that could be considered equivalent across vendor platforms, and thus comparable, were done to ascertain if doing the same search in different interfaces produced the same results.

The results indicated that most interfaces retrieved the same results, the exception being the subject-keyword search which returned the most results in EBSCO (also retrieving 3 / 8,33 % unique results) and the least in ProQuest (where the search also retrieved 4 / 11,11 % unique results). This variation is explained by the different subject options in the three platforms.

Limitations stated by the author(s):

None

Limitations stated by the reviewer(s):

No clear conclusion.

No investigation of recall and precision.

Study Type:

Single study

Related Chapters:

Service providers and search interfaces

Tags:

• CINAHL