Researchers in the M&A Advisory business need the best M&A transaction data possible. All of the full-service databases claim full coverage, have dozens or even hundreds of searching and reporting fields, and offer complex screening and reporting functionality. One way to choose is to evaluate the functionality for information professionals or for end users. Another way (which I haven't seen so I undertook myself) is to examine the content of the databases. Finding all the relevant deals for the project and getting the correct transaction value and target finan-cials are the important content qualities. Below are the test searches and results. This study is methodical, but anecdotal. A statistically valid sample would require doing each of these tests on multiple industries, companies, and deals, and then averaging the results. However, this is more than we had before and I have found it eye-opening. One note: Database functionality doesn't always allow doing searches that are exactly the same, but I've done equivalent searches, to the extent possible. This may account for some but not all the differences. I've noted major search equivalency problems.
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