Databases for Engineering and Technology Literature
- Engineering Information Village
A web-based virtual community for engineers and other technical professionals. Access to Ei Compendex Web database, which indexes and abstracts engineering journals, conferences, and reports.
EI Village for all engineering and technology disciplines.
- Web of Science(01/01/1900 - Present)
Multidisciplinary index covering topics in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. It is the electronic equivalent of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Science Citation Index. Some full text available.
Although less specific to engineering than EI Village, Web of Science covers a broad spectrum of pure and applied sciences research.
- OnePetroIndexes papers for the Society of Petroleum Engineering.
- Petroleum AbstractsCovers the petroleum topic areas of geosciences, drilling, reservoir and production engineering, shipping and storage and other technologies relevant to the upstream petroleum industry.
- ASCE LibraryThis database is an online tool for locating articles across all disciplines of civil engineering. It provides access to more than 80,000 full-text articles from ASCE Journals and Proceedings.
- IEEE XploreFull text of IEEE and IEE journals, proceedings, and standards.
- AIAA Electronic LibraryContains information on aerospace technology, engineering, and science. Includes journal articles and conference papers from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Finding Articles with Engineering Databases
Databases. Why?
Engineering-specific databases can help you connect to quality, peer reviewed research that may be buried or inaccessible in a Google or other search engine set of results.
Most databases provide numerous ways to refine search results, and even allow you to limit your results to a specific document type, such as peer reviewed journal articles, the gold standard in scholarly communication in the engineering disciplines. This can save you, the researcher, time that may have been spent wading through literature that does not meet your criteria.
Search strategies: Most databases perform well with natural language keyword searching, wherein you construct a phrase with several keywords that narrowly targets your research interest. However, if you are working to pull together all of the relevant literature on a given topic, it can be challenging to come up with every single keyword that could be used to describe your topic. To this end, databases leverage subject terms that enable you to search by concept. These subject terms place related keywords (e.g. car, automobile, Toyota Prius) in one location. For comprehensive searching, begin with one or two general keywords, then add subject terms (one at a time is often best) to refine your search. Subject terms appear in the left hand facets column of the search results and within each article's detailed record.
While databases such as Ei Village and Web of Science feature unique coverage in certain areas of research, we do recommend consulting more than one database for comprehensive search results. And while database coverages do overlap in some areas (for example, articles published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics are discoverable in either database), it's important to recognize that databases retrieve, rank, and display results differently, so seemingly identical searches can produce very different experiences from one database to another.