Evaluation of Biomed and ISTPB, two new literature databases from the Institute of Scientific Information Available to Purchase

Two new databases from the Institute of Scientific Information — Biomed and ISTPB — were compared with a number of databases, selected from Medline, Biosis and CAB Abstracts, to determine the usefulness of the two new databases as retrospective search tools. The result of the comparison showed that Biomed could be very useful if directly relevant research front(s) exist for the search query, but for total recall, keywords must also be used. ISTPB could provide additional information that is unavailable in the other databases.