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Engineering Subject Guide — Databases

This guide offers information for students and faculty, on and off campus, on locating library resources and services suited for the School of Engineering.

What are Research Databases?

Research databases can be searched to find peer-reviewed journal articles on a specific research topic. 

In some cases databases contain additional types of information, such as conference proceedings or chemical & physical data. 

Which Database Should I Use? 
There are many different engineering databases.    As a general rule, Engineering Village and Scopus are two of the best general Engineering databases for beginning your search if you are looking for peer reviewed journal articles.
Scroll down for a list of links to the databases.

 

How do I get the best or most pertinent results?
The Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT will help you to narrow or broaden your search.

Engineering Databases

Engineering Village which is made up of both Compendex and Inspec, is the best general search database for engineering, along with Scopus.  PubMed is useful if you are researching biomedical engineering topics. Knovel, Reaxys and SciFinder are great for researching chemical properties or specific data. IEEE is the top resource for electrical engineering.

Acronym Guide:

Many of the databases and scholarly societies have acronyms that can be confusing.  Here are their definitions:

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery

ASTM: American Society for Testing & Materials

IEEE: Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers

IET: Institution of Engineering and Technology

TRB: Transportation Research Board

TRIS: Transportation Research Information Services

ITRD: International Transport Documentation Database (from OCED)

Other Scholarly Societies: we do not subscribe to these as whole databases, but writings may be available through databases we already subscribe to:

ASME: American Society of Mechanical Engineers

ASCE: American Society of Civil Engineers

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