International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP), The Music Index, and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature were evaluated in a number of performance aspects, including the number of titles selectively and comprehensively indexed, timeliness of indexing, breadth of language coverage, and periodical subject area coverage. Concerning timeliness of indexing, it appears the more titles each index tries to control, the less current their indexing. RILM attempts to comprehensively index far fewer titles than the other two databases, but is much more consistent over time, with current issue indexing available for more than half of their comprehensively indexed titles. IIMP also has a respectable number of titles with current issue indexing available, including many quarterly and monthly magazines, but the majority of their titles have a significant indexing gap of one year or more. Music Index has significantly more titles under comprehensive indexing control, but lags behind the others in currency. Concerning language, RILM clearly has the best international coverage, while IIMP indexes relatively few non-English titles. Lastly, there is a surprisingly low degree of overlap of periodical title coverage between the three databases, particularly among the musicology, popular music, and performance-related periodicals.
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Alan Green (2001) studied this question.