International cooperative information services in the agricultural sciences: a comparison of CAB and AGRIS

Abstract

This study identifies two international co-operative information . . &services in the agricultural sciences - CAB and AGRIS - and describes theirhistories, elements and characteristics. The two services are thencompared for coverage, timeliness, indexing policy and quality of citations. CABprovided a bigger subject coverage, a higher coverage of journal literature and had a higher specificity of indexing than AGRIS. The details in references from CAB, which includes an abstract, WBre foundto be better than in AGRIS. The references in AGRIS were, however, found to be relatively more recent than those from CAB. Both services covered only 47% of the material in the bibliography. An overlap of only 17% was identified in the two services leading to the conclusion that the two services could be regarded as c~mplementary.